Stuart Palmer

• Born: June 21, 1905
• Birthplace: Baraboo, Wisconsin
• Died: February 4, 1968
• Place of death: Glendora, California

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; cozy

Principal Series: Hildegarde Withers, 1931-1969; Howard Rook, 1956-1968

Contribution

Stuart Palmer’s fourteen novels and three short-story collections featuring Hildegarde Withers are most notable for forging, in a period dominated in America by male detectives, a woman who can hold her own in a male world. Palmer also created, with quick sketches and convincing settings, an ability that complemented one of his most intriguing techniques: opening novels with a scene that sets a mood but that is often only tangentially related to the ensuing mystery. This technique is responsible for establishing some of the humor in the novels, and it is for his dryly witty style, embodied in Miss Withers, that Palmer is best known. He created an enduringly popular character, the subject of six motion pictures and one made-for-television film.

Biography

Stuart Palmer was born as Charles Stuart Hunter Palmer in Baraboo, Wisconsin, on June 21, 1905, the son of Jay Sherman Palmer and Nellie Secker Palmer. He attended the Art Institute of Chicago from 1922 to 1924 and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, from 1924 to 1926. Palmer began writing as a child; his first short story was completed when he was six, and at twenty he had his first publication in a college literary magazine. Before turning to writing as a career, Palmer held a variety of jobs that provided background for some of his books. Among these were sailor, apple picker, Ringling Brothers clown, iceman, cabdriver, publicist, reporter, copywriter, editor, poet, and ghostwriter.

In 1928, Palmer married the first of five wives, Melina Racioppi, from whom he was divorced in 1937, and in 1931 he wrote his first mystery, Ace of Jades. This novel was followed in the same year by the first of the Hildegarde Withers books, The Penguin Pool Murder, which was an immediate success. After the success of the Miss Withers character, especially of the 1932 film version of the first Withers book, Palmer went to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter while continuing to produce novels and short stories featuring Miss Withers.

In 1939 Palmer was married to his second wife, Margaret Greppin (they were divorced in 1945), and in 1942 he enlisted in the United States Army. As an army major, he served first as a training-film instructor in the field artillery school and then as the liaison officer between the United States Army chief of staff and Hollywood production companies, as well as with all newsreel production companies. In 1947, still in the army, he was married to Ann Higgens.

Discharged in 1948, Palmer returned to screenwriting, and in 1950 he began writing for television as well. Having been divorced from Ann in 1950, he was married for the fourth time in 1952 to Winifred Graham. In 1954-1955, he was president of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1956, he wrote the first of two books featuring Howard Rook, Unhappy Hooligan, set in a circus and drawing on his own experience as a circus clown. Divorced again in 1963 and remarried three years later to Jennifer Elaine Venala, Palmer died on February 4, 1968, in Glendora, California.

A prolific writer, Palmer left, in addition to dozens of film and television scripts, fourteen Hildegarde Withers novels, three collections of short stories featuring Miss Withers, two Howard Rook novels, and five other mystery books. A fifteenth Miss Withers book was in rough draft when he died; it was completed by Fletcher Flora and published posthumously in 1969.

Analysis

Stuart Palmer’s second mystery, The Penguin Pool Murder, was an immediate success. In it he introduced the character who was to become one of the most popular amateur sleuths in American fiction. He also established in that book the qualities that were to become his hallmark as a writer: strong characterization of major characters, humor, convincing settings, clever plotting, and a rapid-fire style that captured mood and setting.

Hildegarde Withers is Palmer’s greatest creation, and her first appearance indicated her personality, for she appeared not as a person but as an anonymous force. A fleeing purse snatcher is sent sprawling by an umbrella thrust between his legs from a crowd. The umbrella belongs to Miss Withers, and its use suggests, before the reader sees or meets her, the presence of someone who takes action when others are too surprised or confused to act. Her desire for action pushes her into the center of events, because not content with giving the police an account of finding a body in the penguin pool at the New York City aquarium, she proceeds to take shorthand notes of the other witnesses’ statements, as well as of Inspector Piper’s musings and orders to his officers. She makes herself so useful that he allows her to accompany him.

Murder on the Blackboard

This determination not to be left out but to act recurs in each book. When, in Murder on the Blackboard (1932), Inspector Piper is seriously injured by a murderer, Miss Withers announces to his second in command that she will be Piper’s understudy and assist in the investigation, and the reader knows that she will do so despite the sergeant’s hesitancy. Left alone while the police are excitedly examining an apparent grave, Miss Withers remains behind, seizing the opportunity to do some uninterrupted sleuthing. She goes through the desks of several of her fellow teachers and discovers clues that later help her solve the mystery, clues that the police misinterpret. Later her investigative determination leads to decidedly unladylike action for a middle-aged woman: “With much grunting and bustling, together with a certain amount of damage to the lady’s serge skirt, Miss Withers clambered to the board and from that eminence managed to squirm through the hole in the ceiling.”

Palmer complements his character’s determination with keen powers of observation. Withers, like her contemporary never-married sleuth, Agatha Christie’s Jane Marple, notices details. She notices a sliver of light where there should be none in The Penguin Pool Murder; she is aware of the sound of a fellow teacher’s footsteps as she goes down the hall and, more important, registers a difference in sound when she returns. Her powers are honed by close contact over the years with third-grade students; just as Miss Marple believes that observing behavior in a small town allows her to understand human behavior on a wider scale, Miss Withers believes that observation of the behavior of small boys gives her an understanding of adult duplicity.

The Puzzle of the Red Stallion

Her observation and determination are not, however, infallible. In The Puzzle of the Red Stallion (1936), Miss Withers finds at the scene of a murder a briar pipe that the police have overlooked. Convinced that it is a clue, she deduces from this single object that the owner is middle-aged, has traveled in Europe widely, is well-to-do, has excellent taste, works with chemicals, is sometimes careless, and wears dentures. Palmer’s humor comes into play when Miss Withers discovers that the pipe belongs to the medical examiner, who dropped it while examining the body. These occasional slips and Miss Withers’s reactions to them add greatly to the reader’s delight in the character and to the appeal of the books.

Much of the series’ popularity stems from such humor, which also springs from Hildegarde’s acerbic wit. Never one to suffer fools gladly, when an unimaginative police sergeant decides the murderer must be someone familiar with the school in Murder on the Blackboard, Miss Withers says, “Simple, isn’t it? . . . You’ve narrowed the suspects down to thirty or forty thousand.” Again, in The Puzzle of the Red Stallion, while walking her dog, Miss Withers is stopped by a pair of particularly doltish police officers who charge her with violating the city’s muzzle ordinance; when Sergeant Greeley says that her clearly gentle dog might bite someone, her barbed response is: “There are times when I would consider it in the light of a direct answer to prayer,” a jab rendered all the more humorous by the obtuse sergeant’s failure to recognize it.

Comic situations add much to the reader’s pleasure in Palmer’s novels. In The Puzzle of the Red Stallion, Miss Withers, hot on the trail of the murder weapon, is being followed by Inspector Piper and Sergeant Burke, who are hot on her trail to see what she will discover. Miss Withers encourages her dog to fetch an object that she believes to be the weapon from a small pool in Central Park. Burke and Piper look down from an elevated transverse:

At the moment the quiet of this sylvan scene was being rudely shattered by a small and excited terrier who was leaping about in the shallow water near the shore and barking at the top of his lungs.

Beside him, perched precariously upon a teetering rock which threatened every moment to tip and hurl her headlong into the water, stood Miss Hildegarde Withers. She was engaged in poking at the depths with a thin willow switch.

That the much-sought-for object proves to be a turtle amplifies the ridiculousness of the scene, but even more amusing are the quirks of character revealed by the situation: the bungling ineptitude of the professionals who must follow the superior, if amateur, sleuth, and the awkwardness of the lady prodding at the water while her dog yaps at her.

Palmer similarly undercuts the seriousness of the opening scene in Murder on the Blackboard: “The solitary prisoner sat quietly, his hands clasped in front of him. One shoe moved up and down against its mate, but there was no quivering of his lips. He’d show Them if he could take it or not!” The prisoner, however, is a small boy kept after school, and the release of tension that the reader experiences on learning the prisoner’s identity causes a smile of relief and amusement. Palmer moves between comedy and threat, even terror, in his mysteries, and that movement enhances the reader’s interest in both character and plot by striking a balance between the two. The results are compelling novels.

The opening scene of Murder on the Blackboard exemplifies another Palmer device: the opening that creates a mood and sets a scene but frequently has little to do with the actual case. In this mystery, the mood of threat is established, then dissipated; the dissipated threat does not mean that this has become an ordinary day, however. It is not: The situation described in the opening scene gives rise to Miss Withers’s varying her ordinary routine, and as a result she finds the body and eventually solves the case. Palmer’s opening scene thus establishes the mystery and begin the series of steps toward its resolution. Any other opening would demand a different approach telling the story.

The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan

Related to this type of opening is Palmer’s ability to create convincing settings. The brevity of the opening scene in Murder on the Blackboard is typical of Palmer’s technique. In The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (1941), Miss Withers becomes a technical adviser for a film to be made about Lizzie Borden, and is given her own office:

There was a big oak desk, a typewriter on a stand, two chairs and an uncertain-looking lounge. The one window was covered with a Venetian blind, but since the view consisted only of the flat roofs of studio sound stages, with some round brown hills beyond, that was small loss.

In only a few words, Plamer gives the reader an understanding of place, something which many writers would spend more time doing. The single phrase “uncertain-looking lounge” tells as much about the office as could several paragraphs of description.

Palmer at times used his own experiences as background for his books. Unhappy Hooligan (1956), for example, is set in the circus, and Palmer’s stint working as a clown for Ringling Brothers is clearly responsible for the setting’s realism. Similarly, The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan, set in Hollywood, with much of the action taking place in a film studio, draws on Palmer’s experiences as a screenwriter. Palmer is not above inserting inside jokes into his novels; in The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan, Hildegarde is at one point mistaken for Edna May Oliver, the actress who played Miss Withers in three motion pictures: The Penguin Pool Murder (1932), Murder on the Blackboard (1934), and Murder on a Honeymoon (1935).

Palmer’s plots are complicated, not because the motives or methods of murder are complicated, but because the reader learns things only as Miss Withers does. Therefore, clues may not be recognized, and false scents may be followed. On the other hand, Palmer’s plots are usually tightly constructed, and the reader, like Palmer’s protagonist, is given enough information to solve the case. The quick-witted reader can see where Miss Withers is going astray.

Nevertheless, readers may find that there are some irritating flaws in plot and characterization. The principal asks Miss Withers to investigate in Murder on the Blackboard, then nervously withdraws the invitation; his actions are never adequately explained. In the same novel, the reader never learns how the suspect circumvented an exacting system of identification. Still, these flaws are negligible compared with Palmer’s failure to develop minor characters adequately. He devotes his energies to the major characters, plots, and settings, leaving the supporting cast largely two-dimensional. The police are, with the exception of Oscar Piper and a very few others, dumb Irish flatfeet who are unimaginative and incapable of detecting anything. The head of Mammoth Productions, Mr. Thorwald L. Nincom, is a broadly drawn composite of the popular image of a film producer; he is thoroughly two-dimensional. Yet one can also credit such stock characterization as the source of much of these novels’ humor, in a medium where humor and atmosphere often count for more than fully rounded characterization on all levels.

Miss Withers was created in the depth of the Depression, and she and her exploits provided some respite from the problems of the time. That she remains a charming figure and an appealing sleuth long after the 1930’s is testimony to her enduring qualities.

Principal Series Characters:

• Hildegarde Martha Withers , a dry-witted and keenly observant amateur sleuth, is about forty when she first appears. An elementary school teacher in the early books, she later retires to devote more time to detecting. Although a single woman throughout the series, she is engaged to Oscar Piper for approximately half an hour between the events of the first and second books. Palmer based her on his high-school English teacher, Miss Fern Hackett, and on his father.
• Oscar Piper , inspector, New York City Police Department, is about forty, graying, tall, and gaunt. Rough-spoken, with a taste for whiskey and with a cigar constantly in the corner of his mouth, Piper is the opposite of the prim and abstemious Miss Withers.
• Howard Rook , a retired newspaperman, is a middle-aged misogynist, overweight and sloppy, who, forced into retirement, maintains a running argument with the police.

Bibliography

Brean, Herbert, ed. The Mystery Writer’s Handbook. New York: Harper, 1956. Guide to writing mysteries with examples of writers, including Palmer.

Kaye, Marvin, ed. The Game Is Afoot: Parodies, Pastiches, and Ponderings of Sherlock Holmes. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. A collection of works about Sherlock Holmes or that use him as a character. Includes Palmer’s story “The Adventure of the Marked Man” and a brief introductory biography of him.

Pringle, David. Imaginary People: A Who’s Who of Modern Fictional Characters from the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1996. Contains an entry on Hildegard Withers, Palmer’s most famous character.

Queen, Ellery. Introduction to The Monkey Murder and Other Hildegarde Withers Stories. New York: L. E. Spivak, 1950. Essay devoted to Palmer’s most famous character and her place in the annals of detective fiction.

Rice, Grantland. Introduction to Sporting Blood: The Great Sports Detective Stories, edited by Ellery Queen. Boston: Little, Brown, 1942. Includes discussion of Palmer’s contribution to sports detective fiction.