by Tony Medawar
‘Oscar,’ she insisted, ‘will you take me over to the course? But for heaven’s sake let’s have no blaring of sirens this time.’
They approached Meadowland very quietly indeed, and at Miss Withers’ instigation the squad car was parked far down the macadam road.
Then, leaving the uniformed driver at the wheel, the Inspector followed Miss Withers over the wire fence and across the turf. ‘Good Lord, woman, are you still harping on that pool?’
She sniffed, and led the way. ‘I want a description from Patrolman Fogle of that ghost he saw,’ she admitted.
But Fogle was not on duty above the pool. Another uniformed man approached after a moment, crashing through the underbrush down the gully. He snapped to salute.
‘Where’s Fogle?’ asked Piper sharply.
‘Hasn’t relieved me yet, sir. I guess last night was too much for him, because he was due at two o’clock and it’s nearly half past.’
‘What were you doing off your post? Looking for him?’
The cop reddened. ‘No, sir. I—I thought I seen something moving down there …’
Piper shook his head. ‘I guess all you men out here believe in fairies,’ he growled. ‘Was it a grinning skull or a snake with wings?’
‘No, sir,’ said the patrolman seriously. ‘It was a young guy in golf clothes, and he could run like a deer.’
‘Yeah!’ said Piper.
But Miss Withers, who had climbed back to the edge of the gully, was staring out over the course. ‘He still is,’ she remarked. ‘Running like a deer, I mean. And if he doesn’t look out …’
Piper and the cop joined her in time to get a clear, if distant, view of a young man who looked very much like Ronald Farling, as he vaulted the wire fence into the road and was immediately clasped in the brawny arms of the uniformed man who drove Piper’s car.
When the others came up he was arguing furiously with his captor. ‘Let him go!’ ordered Piper.
Ronald Farling, looking a little wild and dishevelled from his night in jail, faced them. ‘I suppose you want to know why I’m here?’ he demanded.
Miss Withers shook her head. ‘You’re looking for the same thing we are,’ she advised him. ‘Come with us, if you wish. In the words of the popular song, we’re heading for the last roundup.’
They crept towards the club house in silence, keeping always behind the rolling little hills, following gullies and the shadows of scattered trees. ‘Hildegarde, what are you up to?’ Piper begged.
‘I haven’t the slightest idea!’ she admitted. ‘But I’m going to learn something.’
The wind still blew gustily from the north, driving dead leaves into their faces, and bringing the sound of loud voices from somewhere behind the club house. They crept steadily on, and finally reached the vantage point of a hedge.
From here they could get a good view of the club house, and of the littered yard in the rear where Chris Thorr stood, raking at the refuse. Beside him was Patrolman Fogle.
‘Say!’ broke out Piper. ‘There’s something—’
But Miss Withers hushed him. ‘Listen.’
‘Well, then—I bet you twenty dollars against five that you can’t hit it in one out of three tries!’
Thorr’s voice came clearly, and it bore an undercurrent of masked excitement …
Fogle scratched the back of his neck, and drew out his service gun. ‘You talk too loud, fella,’ he said. ‘I hate to do it, but I’m going to take your money.’
They were standing perhaps twenty feet from the broken-down piano case which Miss Withers had noticed last night. Now she saw with a gasp of surprise that a homemade target of black and white circles had been tacked on the side of the box.
‘Okay,’ Fogle said doggedly. ‘I’ve got three tries to put a slug in the centre of that target, and if I do it you pay me twenty bucks.’ He raised his gun …
Miss Withers tried to scream, and found that no sound issued from her throat. She grabbed the Inspector. ‘Stop him!’ she gasped.
‘Illegal target practice within city limits of New York, illegal firing of service gun …’ mumbled the Inspector. He stood up quickly.
‘Hey, there! What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
The two in the yard whirled to face them. Miss Withers tottered on after the Inspector, who glared at the patrolman.
Fogle was in a spot, and he knew it. ‘I—sorry, sir. But he was razzing me about police marksmanship, sir. On account of my firing last night at the ghost or whatever it was. Claimed I couldn’t hit the piano box, much less the target. So we made a bet—’
Piper was grinning. ‘Oh, he thinks cops can’t shoot, eh?’
Chris Thorr nodded. ‘Couldn’t hit a barn if you were inside with the doors shut. Not like the police in Switzerland, let me tell you. Say—’
Piper rubbed his chin. ‘Fogle, how come you’re stalling around here? Don’t you go back on duty?’
‘At two p.m., yes sir. But I just looked at the clock inside and it’s only one forty-five.’ He grinned. ‘So I thought I had time to show this guy …’
‘Go ahead and show him,’ Piper ordered. ‘Just this once we’ll forget regulations …’
Miss Withers could hold herself no longer. ‘Forget regulations and forget the common sense you were born with,’ she screamed. ‘But first me let get in that piano box …’
She attacked it furiously with tooth and nail, but it was stouter than it seemed. Young Ronald Farling came forward to help her, while Thorr and the cops looked blankly on. Then at last a board was pried away, and another …
‘Oh, God!’ cried Ronald Farling. ‘Molly!’
It was Molly Gargan—her soft young body wound with cruel ropes, her red mouth gagged with a twisted rag. Tenderly they took her down from the hook which had held her there, with her heart beating just behind the bull’s-eye of the target …
Only a half inch of soft pine lay between Molly Gargan and the leaden death which had hung poised above her …
It all happened in a split second. ‘Get that man!’ screamed Miss Withers.
Gnarled, dried-up Chris Thorr suddenly had come alive. He flung Fogle head over heels, knocked the Inspector to his knees with the ever-present rake which he had snatched from behind him, and was running amok towards the two women.
His mouth was open and frothing, and a shrill endless scream of antic insanity filled the air …
Then Ronald Farling stepped in, dodged the swinging iron teeth of the rake, and brought his fist smartly into the madman’s groin. Again—and then a right across to the chin that sent him backwards—
He did not rise. When things had calmed a bit, they found out why. He had fallen upon the tines of his own rusty rake, and three of the iron spikes had pierced his brain.
Farling and the girl leaned against the piano box, touching each other gently, wonderingly … they had no eyes or ears for anything else.
But the Inspector fairly gnawed at his cigar.
‘Hildegarde! It’s a madhouse!’
‘Not quite,’ she said. ‘Thorr wanted to get Molly put out of the way, and chose this means. Fogle was to have shot her as she stood bound and gagged in the piano box. Then later Thorr would have hidden the body out on the course somewhere—and with one or more bullets from Fogle’s gun in the body, he would be the one to be suspected, particularly since he shot wildly at a phantom last night …’
‘Yeah, but what phantom?’
‘I imagine it was Thorr, in his night-shirt and barefoot,’ Miss Withers went on. ‘He didn’t know that there’d be a guard at the pool, or at least he wasn’t sure. He had some unfinished business there—’
‘So you say!’ objected Piper. But why would Thorr want to kill Molly here?’
‘Ask her,’ said Miss Withers. ‘She knows.’
Molly did know. It was because she had feared and suspected Thorr for some time, and therefore when her sweetheart was arrested for the murder of his foster-father she had started scouting arou
nd …
‘And you found what?’ Miss Withers asked.
‘I found that there were some brown stains on the end of Thorr’s rake handle,’ said Molly Gargan. And suddenly the whole thing was clear to Miss Withers.
‘That’s why he tied you up when he found you examining his rake! It was the murder weapon—not the golf ball.’
Piper shook his head. ‘You’re still crazy. What possible motive would there be—’
‘For Thorr to kill Farling? A very good one. Enter the pool once more, Oscar. You see, Farling must have been looking for his lost ball, and have poked at the water with that dead stick, just as I did. And Thorr, lurking nearby, saw him probing the pool and rushed up to hurl his rake like a javelin. The rake handle is just the diameter of a golf ball, Oscar. He thought of that when he had finished the deed, so he took the one remaining ball from his victim’s bag, touched it to the wound, and dropped it nearby. He wanted it to appear like an accident, Oscar.’
‘But why, in the name of heaven, should Thorr object to having Farling poke around in that pool?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ said Miss Hildegarde Withers. ‘We won’t know for sure until you drag the pool, as I’ve begged you to do, again and again. But I’ve got a pretty good idea that you’ll find the sunken body of the wife who is supposed to have left Chris Thorr last August and run away with a travelling man.’
‘Well, who’d have suspected that?’ exclaimed Piper.
‘Who indeed—but I?’ Miss Withers flashed back.
STUART PALMER
Charles Stuart Palmer, one of the great writers of comic detective fiction, was born on 21 June 1905 in a farmhouse on the Baraboo side of the Butterfield Bridge on the outskirts of Portage, Wisconsin. A lively child, Palmer played an active role in the junior branch of the Lower Narrows Farmers’ Club in Portage, participating in social events like ice cream suppers and musical evenings, singing along to music played on a Grafonola. At Baraboo High School he demonstrated an aptitude for poetry and his first published work was a poem, ‘The Saner Memory’, which appeared in the Chicago Tribune under the pen name ‘The Dauber’. That pseudonym reflected an equally precocious talent for drawing, which led to Palmer’s studying at the Chicago Art Institute and then at the State University where he began writing in earnest. Various articles were published in the university’s literary magazine and in The Daily Cardinal, whose popular Skyrockets column was edited by Palmer; he also contributed cartoons and skits to The Octopus, a campus humour magazine of which he also eventually became editor.
In later years, Palmer would claim to have had all sorts of jobs after he graduated, even a spell with the Ringling Brothers’ famous circus. And perhaps he did. What is certain is that he wrote, a lot, with cartoons and short pieces appearing in College Humor, Life, The New Yorker and Judge, and he also edited several magazines including Dance and Ghost Stories which published Palmer’s enduring hoax about the mysterious disappearance of David Lang, an entirely fictitious Tennessee farmer. Ghost Stories also published Palmer’s first novel, The Gargoyle’s Throat (1930), as well as several stories under the pseudonym ‘Theodore Orchards’. While working as a journalist, Palmer also retained strong links with his university, editing a selection of undergraduates’ work, Wisconsin Writings 1931. The anthology was published by the Mohawk Press which also published Palmer’s second novel, Ace of Jades (1931), in which precocious teenager ‘Bubbles’ Deagan becomes embroiled with a bootlegger.
Ace of Jades drew Palmer to the attention of a larger publisher, Brentano’s, where his editor suggested he next write a detective story and set it in the New York Aquarium. The result was The Penguin Pool Murder (1931) in which Palmer introduced a police inspector, Oscar Piper, and a ‘horse-faced’ Iowa schoolteacher, Miss Hildegarde Withers. Although it has been suggested that Palmer was influenced by Anna Katharine Green’s tales of spinster Amelia Butterworth and police detective Ebenezer Gryce, Palmer often said that he conceived Withers only as ‘a minor character, for comedy relief’ but had found her ‘taking over’. Withers was based on Miss Fern Hackett, Palmer’s high school Head of English, whom he claimed had made his life miserable for two years but started him off as a writer.
The film rights to The Penguin Pool Murder were sold quickly and James Gleason and Edna May Oliver cast as Piper and Miss Withers. As Willis Goldbeck worked on the script Palmer fell in with the publicity drive, announcing his intention to travel to the Galápagos Islands to bring back the required penguins and suggesting that, if the expedition failed, ‘a couple of trained ducks [be made up] as penguins’; he also arranged for the film to have its premiere at the Al Ringling Theater in his home town of Baraboo. The Penguin Pool Murder (1932) was an immediate success and two more films followed quickly: Murder on the Blackboard (1934), scripted again by Goldbeck, and Murder on a Honeymoon (1935), adapted from Palmer’s novel The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (1933) by Seton Miller and the humorist Robert Benchley. Unfortunately, Edna May Oliver left the series after the third film and neither of the actresses that followed—Helen Broderick and ZaSu Pitts—was a success.
In 1933 Palmer moved to New York and from there he relocated to Laguna Beach, California, where he later claimed to have built up an extensive collection of penguin statuettes—‘second only to Roland Young’—while his pets apparently included a Wodehousian cat called PSmith and a wire-haired puppy called PJones. Although he would move house several times, Palmer remained in California for the rest of his life, gradually being joined there by others in his family.
After sharing credits on scripts for films like Hollywood Stadium Mystery (1938), co-written with Dorrell McGowan and Stuart McGowan, and Yellowstone (1936), the ‘great geyser murder mystery’ with Jefferson Parker, Palmer began writing scripts on his own for mysteries and comedies such as Who Killed Aunt Maggie? (1940) and Pardon My Stripes (1942). With the entry of the United States into the Second World War, Palmer spent six years with the army, attaining the rank of major, making training films and later serving in Washington DC as liaison officer between the army and the film industry. A few years later, writing as ‘Jay Stewart’, a name inspired by his father, Palmer drew on his wartime experiences for Before It’s Too Late (1950), a murder mystery set in and around the Pentagon.
Palmer was discharged in 1946 and on returning to southern California resumed writing scripts, now mainly for television. He also continued to write novels and short mystery, science fiction and fantasy stories, as well as Sherlockian pastiches. In 1950 Palmer and his great friend, the crime writer Craig Rice (Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig), won first prize for ‘Once upon a Train (The Loco Motive)’ in a short story competition run by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. As well as fiction, Palmer also wrote from time to time about real-life crime, including the 1932 Wanderwell mystery, and his life story of ‘Bloody Babs’ Graham was widely syndicated in the press in 1954, the year in which Palmer served as President of the Mystery Writers of America.
In the 1950s and ’60s, Palmer made several radio and television appearances on shows like You Bet Your Life, hosted by Groucho Marx (whom, incidentally, Palmer later cast in a short story named for the show). In 1961 he wrote a romantic radio play, Three-Dimensional Valentine, for a marathon charity broadcast, and in the same year, as ‘poet laureate’ for the Society of Friends of Lizzie Borden—the alleged perpetrator of the Fall River axe murders—Palmer led an unsuccessful campaign to have a statue erected in her memory. He was active in the Baker Street Irregulars, where he had been ennobled as ‘The Remarkable Worm’, and he regularly gave talks at the Long Beach Writers’ Club and elsewhere on ‘How to be a Writer—and Keep on Living’. He even occasionally opened his home in Van Nuys, California, to host workshops for freshmen and sophomore writers whom he advised ‘if you seek immortality you will find it in writing books … you never die when someone reads a page you have written’.
A ladies’ man, Stuart Palmer was married five times, including to Winifred E. Wise, th
e writer of non-fiction for children whom he had met at university decades earlier. He died on 4 May 1968. His final novel, Rook Takes Knight (1968), was published posthumously, and after his death his widow created a scholarship in his name at Glendale College, California
The earliest of around a dozen uncollected Miss Withers stories, ‘The Riddle of the Black Spade’ was first published in Mystery in October 1934.
A TORCH AT THE WINDOW
Josephine Bell
It was a dark night in late autumn when the trouble started. There was no moon, and the large irregular bulk of St Stephen’s Hospital loomed black behind the bright lights at the entrance gates and in the main porters’ lodge. Beyond the first two blocks and the Out-Patient department the lamp-posts on either side of the main drive ended. They gave most light round the sweep of the Casualty entrance. Beyond that a car needed headlights to follow the winding macadam between the other blocks of the main building and the grounds behind them to the new Annexe block and the hospital boundary. It might have been a narrow country lane, and since the hospital stood on the outskirts of the market town it served, and in daylight there was a fine view over fields and distant hills, the night air there was always clean and sharp and smelled of the country.
In Brodie Ward in the Annexe most of the patients slept. It was after eleven, and they had been settled down some three hours earlier. Brodie was an orthopaedic ward for men, a surgical ward dealing with operations on bones and joints, with a never-ending turnover of road accidents and fractures sustained in factory or home. Because surgical patients of this type are seldom chronically ill people, most of them were sleeping peacefully in darkness. A few blue-shaded lights hung over the beds of those freshly operated upon, or over new accident arrivals, critically ill from shock or injury.
Out of the darkness and the silence a firm young voice called softly, ‘Nurse!’
There was a rustle near the entrance end of the ward. A slim figure in uniform came out from the curtained cubicle where a blue light shone, and passed quickly down the ward. ‘What is it, Barry?’
