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, the 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.