“The Riddle of the Lady of Dubuque” opens with Elise Pender, receptionist to Dr. Paul Severance, stealing a .32 caliber. She’s determined to stop him from marrying Corinne Lapham. Miss Withers is brought in to pose as Corinne’s aunt, under the logic that she might be better at talking the girl down than a policeman. But the police do show up and take Dr. Severance in for questioning; Elise was found shot to death in his office. The police think she threatened him and he killed her by accident, but Miss Withers suspects otherwise. Not a bad story, but modern-day readers won’t pick up on the subtle clue that Miss Withers does.
“The Riddle of the Yellow Canary” is a highlight of the collection. Arthur Reese is a Tin Pan Alley man looking for the next hit. Unfortunately, he made the mistake of sleeping with the underage Margie Thorens and is now being blackmailed. But her newest song is very good. The first part of the story has Reese killing two birds with one stone: he poisons Margie, tricks her into writing her own suicide note under the guise of a song, and finally leaves her body behind a locked door. It’s almost the perfect crime.
And he might have gotten away with it if Inspector Piper hadn’t brought Miss Withers to the scene to give her an example of how the police determine suicide. An unbent pencil raises her suspicions, but it’s not until she goes to Margie’s apartment and meets her canary that she’s sure it’s murder. The reader isn’t granted the details needed to figure out the unbent pencil clue, but this is a good story with a satisfying murderer takedown.
Next up is “The Riddle of the Blue Fingerprint.” The opening is similar to Queen’s The French Powder Mystery. An antique wardrobe is the latest item up for auction. But when it’s opened, a body, that of Dr. Carl Brotherly, comes tumbling out. Miss Withers is in attendance; she was hired to find the dead man, and the necklace of pearls he made off with. The pearls aren’t on him, but what is on him a photograph of a fingerprint. However, this is one of the weaker stories in the collection. The truth behind the fingerprint is an interesting historical fact, but the mystery is quite weak, with it very unclear what actually happened, and Miss Withers deducing the killer through omniscience rather than evidence.
“The Riddle of the Doctor’s Double” has a chaotic opening. Withers and Palmer are returning from a concert when they’re alerted by a cry for help from a nearby brownstone. It’s the home of Johan Wurtz. Thankfully, the man of the house survives his heart attack, but his doctor warns the two detectives that he believes that someone is trying to kill the man. His niece or nephew, who will inherit money when the old grouch dies? The next-door neighbor, whose father died from the stress of a legal dispute with Wurtz? A few days later, a man posing as the doctor infiltrates the house and strangles him in his bed. Miss Withers goes to work. Her solution doesn’t hinge on any clever clues, but on what she discovers immediately after the crime, which is a bit of shame. This is merely okay.
“The Riddle of the Twelve Amethysts” is Palmer’s take on Sherlock Holmes. The grand dame speaks like him and even goes in an unnecessary disguise. The mystery kicks off when one of her former students, now a solider, comes to her for help. An old flame of his, Deidre, needs help. Her husband is subject to an unusual form of blackmail; someone has been sending him amethysts, one a month, and he withdraws money every time he gets one. The wife suspects it has something to do with a maid they fired a year ago, who might have been bought off with the necklace. Miss Withers playing Holmes is great fun, but sadly this story ends with a dull thud. The premise is so intriguing, but we get a cop-out solution. It reminds me of one of those Denis Smith Holmes pastiches I reviewed a while back.
“The Riddle of the Black Museum” is my personal favorite, with an excellent set-up. The museum in question is New York’s take on Scotland Yard’s Black Museum, a collection of famous murder weapons and evidence. Three men arrive for a tour when the receptionist leaves to take a phone call. When he returns, one of the men has been strangled to death, and each of the other two accuse the other. Both suspects are prominent men, so Inspector Piper is forced to take a more subtle approach, hence him calling in Miss Withers. But which of the two is the killer? And why would either murder a harmless, soon-to-retired hotel headwaiter neither of them had met? Well, the motive is a bit of lucky guess on Miss Withers’s part, but her deduction pointing to the killer is better. I suspect that more skilled mystery readers will suspect the truth sooner, but even then, the image of the murder is delightfully macabre.
“The Riddle of the Green Ice” is also pretty good. A jewelry store smash-and-grab leaves a police officer dead and Inspector Piper under political pressure to bring him to justice. The titular item is an emerald ring that the inexperienced crook accidentally left behind. Piper plans to use it as bait to snag him in a dragnet. There’s some contrived drama between him and Miss Withers, as he’s convinced that she leaked details of the dragnet to the press. I don’t mind some conflict between our investigators, but it felt very unlikely that he would actually consider this, as opposed to just not being able to shake the suspicion. Anyway, the thief and killer is cleverer than Piper expects, and the method he uses to evade the dragnet is a good one. Of course, Miss Withers gets the last laugh by producing the jewel. Not a bad story.
One comment: Were painters going crazy from lead poisoning really that common?
“The Riddle of the Snafu Murder,” sees Miss Withers receiving a visit from the FBI. It seems that a woman suspected of being a spy gave her name after two of her lovers got into a bar fight. Miss Withers suspects that the girl might be a former student but can’t place her. She tracks down a possible suspect just in time to get sucked into a murder investigation, a solider strangled in an apartment building. I admit I didn’t care for this story at first. Miss Withers makes a sudden jump regarding a name at one point that I didn’t follow. But her logic regarding the killer is great and redeems the story.
I admit, I didn’t enjoy this collection when I read it the first time. I found the plotting chaotic and slapdash, the mysteries rushed, the cluing poor. Re-reading for this review, I see that they’re a little better constructed than I thought. But I still find this collection hard to recommend. “Yellow Canary” and “Black Museum” are worth reading, but someone who’s not already a fan of Palmer, or at least of this screwball style of mysteries, probably won’t get much out of it. If you’re a Palmer and Withers lover, give this a try. But if not, this is Not Recommended, with Caveats. (I had issues with it, but you might like it.)
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