People vs Withers and Malone

254 pages. (8" x 5 1/2") bound in original publisher's quarter beige cloth with black brown lettering to spine and decorate square with initial to cover over red marbled boards in original pictorial jacket. Introduction by by Ellery Queen. First edition.

Intermittently from the late Forties into the early Sixties, Palmer and his good friend and fellow mystery writer Craig Rice, with whom he had worked on the scripting of the 1942 film The Falcon's Brother, collaborated on half a dozen novelettes for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Each story teams the crusty Miss Withers, that "tall, angular person who somehow suggested a fairly well-dressed scarecrow," with Rice's hard-drinking, womanizing Chicago lawyer, John J. Malone. And all six are collected in this volume. Working in tandem, Withers and Malone solve what the dust-jacket blurb describes as "hectic, hilarious homicides." A fair assessment: Both Palmer and Rice wrote cleverly constructed, fair-play whodunits flavored with (sometimes wacky) humor, and the blending of their talents produced some memorable stories. One is the title novelette, in which Hildegarde and John J. hunt for a missing witness in the murder trial of a Malone client and wind up pulling off some courtroom pyrotechnics to rival any in the Perry Mason canon. In "Cherchez la Frame," the two sleuths travel to Hollywood to look for the missing wife of a Chicago gangster and find her strangled with Malone's tie in his hotel bathroom. But the best of the stories is probably the first Withers and Malone collaboration, "Once Upon a Train" (original title: "Loco Motive"). This spoof of the intrigue-on-the-Orient-Express genre takes place on the Super-Century en route from Chicago to New York and features a dead man lurking sans clothing in Miss Withers's compartment, the murder weapon conveniently planted in Malone's adjoining compartment, and a combination of quick thinking by the little lawyer and a bizarre dream by the angular spinster that unmasks the culprit. "Once Upon a Train" was one of two Withers and Malone stories sold to MG — "resulting finally," Stuart Palmer writes in his preface, "in Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone, a starring vehicle for James Whitmore, in which Miss Withers mysteriously changed into Ma Kettle." Palmer and Rice were two of the scriptwriters on that 1951 film. Each of these six stories is enjoyable light reading and should appeal not only to fans of either or both series, but to anyone who enjoys what Ellery Queen refers to in the book's introduction as "madcap capers … full o' fun."

Condition:

Pages age toned. Jacket spine sunned else a better than very good copy in like jacket.