Stuart Palmer (1905-1968) was a prolific writer, active in the crime fiction community from the 1930s into the 1960s. He was a well-regarded practitioner of the detective story, even serving as President of the Mystery Writers of America in 1954. He also dabbled in science fiction and Sherlock Holmes pastiches, and worked as a Hollywood screenwriter.
His best-known work features spinster schoolteacher Hildegard Withers, who solves murders with the reluctant help of Inspector Oscar Piper of the NYPD. The character was popular enough to spawn an RKO Pictures film series: six films from 1932 to 1937. Palmer also collaborated with author Craig Rice on a crossover series featuring Miss Withers with Rice's lawyer sleuth character, John Malone.
I'm a fan of the Hildegard Withers short stories; and of the Withers+Malone stories, too. So I was interested to learn that Palmer's earliest published writing was for Ghost Stories Magazine! What, I wondered, might Palmer's ghost stories be like?
According to the Online Books Page, Ghost Stories and all its contents appear to be in the US public domain. Presto!---a new literary excavation project for me!
Ghost Stories Magazine #
As I mentioned when I did the Dr. Martinus series, Ghost Stories purported to publish "true" first person accounts of ghostly encounters. The tales were credited to the narrator of the account, usually "as told to" the actual author. The authorial fiction was a bit transparent. Even when the byline on the first page of a story appears as "by [narrator] as told to [author]," the table of contents credits only the author. The magazine also published third-person articles about "authentic" supernatural historical events.
Palmer wrote for Ghost Stories from 1928 to 1931, under at least three names, including his own. The pseudonyms allowed the magazine to publish multiple pieces by him simultaneously: the October 1929 and April 1930 issues both feature two Palmer contributions each, bylined with different names. Palmer also wrote for Ghost Stories's short lived sister publication, True Strange Stories. The August 1929 issue of True Strange Stories boasts three Palmer contributions, again under three different pen-names! He wrote short stories, articles, and one five-part novella. I was especially excited to discover that Palmer had even created a mini occult investigator series: two (possibly three) stories about Karl Brandt, ghost-layer!
So already this project has been a treat... .
Over the next few weeks or months, I'll be transcribing and posting the stories that I've found, and collecting the links to my transcriptions on the Stuart Palmer Supernatural Writing project page. I'll also list publication information for the stories that I can't find.
The first entry is below.
Stigma #
This seems to be Palmer's earliest published prose work; The FictionMags Index lists a poem, "The Haunted Lover," published in The Milwaukee Journal, June 26, 1926. Could be supernatural, or not; either way, I can't access the newpaper online to take a look. it appeared in the September 1928 issue of Ghost Stories.
- Stigma: A sinister man comes to a young New York physician with severe, mysterious burns. Burns that heal within a day, only to appear the next morning. How? And perhaps more importantly: why?
Plotwise, this is a fairly standard ghostly revenge tale, but I'll cut a newbie author some slack about that. The prose was atmospheric, and the climax was especially gripping. This is something that I noticed about several of these tales: Palmer knows how to write an exciting ending!
Spoiler: Click to expand.
When I read this story, I thought it might be partially inspired by the infamous Lindbergh kidnapping. But the kidnapping occurred in 1932, four years after this story appeared in Ghost Stories. Just a tragic coincidence.
A Forgotten but Interesting Part of His Work #
I doubt that anyone will ever consider Palmer's supernatural writings to be a significant part of his oeuvre. But, as someone who enjoys both crime fiction and ghost stories, the tales have been a delightful surprise.
I often find that the supernatural offerings of crime fiction writers can be a bit lacking (see here and here, too). But the short stories that I've read for this project are well-written and engaging; the style is higher quality than I generally expect from pulp fiction. I won't claim that these stories and articles are as good as the Hildegard Withers series, but they've been interesting and varied, and generally fun to read.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to sharing the stories that I found, and I hope all of you enjoy reading them.
Stay tuned!
Postscript: The Case of David Lang #
After Palmer hit his stride in the crime fiction field, he stopped writing supernaturally-themed pieces. This is not too surprising; ghost stories might just have been something he wrote to pay the bills, until his detective story career took off.
But in July 1953, two decades after the successful debut of Miss Withers, Palmers published a story in Fate magazine called "How Lost Was My Father?" In it, a woman recounts the case of her father, David Lang, who vanished in 1880 while walking through a field, right before the eyes of several witnesses.
The narrative is a blatant reworking of the Ambrose Bierce story "The Difficulty of Crossing a Field", first published in the San Francisco Examiner, October 14, 1888. Palmer owns this "borrowing," even implying in his story that Bierce's tale is based on the David Lang case!
Fate boasted the tagline "True stories of the strange and the unknown," and the magazine's readers took Palmer's story as factual. The David Lang anecdote was repeated in books with names like Strange Mysteries of Time and Space, and Stranger Than Science. Readers of a Fortean bent speculated about possible mechanisms for Lang's disappearance. According to the story's introduction in the Crippen and Landru collection Hildegard Withers: Final Riddles (2021), the disappearance of David Lang was still kicking around as fact at late as 1981!
This was a single "true ghost experience" in a period when Palmer was writing almost exclusively detective stories. A few years after the Fate story, Palmer published a piece called "Ghosts All Around Him" in the adventure magazine Valor for Men, June 1958. I haven't read it, but it sounds like it could plausibly be a ghost story or a "true ghost experience." If so, perhaps it, too, was a leftover from the Ghost Stories days. So it seems possible, even likely, to me that the story is a leftover draft from Palmer's Ghost Stories period. Perhaps he found it in the back of a drawer, and thought, why let anything go to waste?
More Reading #
If you are interested in reading a bit more about Stuart Palmer, or checking out some of his mystery fiction, here are some pointers for you.
Steven Saylor wrote an excellent appreciation of Stuart Palmer and Hildegard Withers, which is online at his website. It includes Palmer's bibliography, and the Hildegard Withers filmography.
There's an article on the connection between Ambrose Bierce and the David Lang story here at Literary Bierce. Scroll about halfway down the page to "Ambrose Bierce and The David Lang Hoax."
Hildegard Withers: Final Riddles (Crippen and Landru, 2021) is a collection of Palmer short stories, mostly Miss Withers, of course. It also includes "How Lost was my Father?", some Sherlockiana, and a story featuring Palmer's other series character, Howie Rook. Steven Saylor provides the Introduction.
Crippen and Landru also have an eBook edition of their 2002 collection, Hildegard Withers: Uncollected Riddles.
People vs. Withers & Malone (Simon and Schuster, 1963) is a collection of stories featuring both Miss Withers and Craig Rice's series character John Malone, all of which were originally published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Maybe some day someone will republish the collection; until then, here's a copy on loan at the Open Library. Officially, these stories are Palmer/Rice collaborations; in reality, as sadly documented in Saylor's article above, they are mostly written by Palmer.