Tue 23 Feb 2016
A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review: STUART PALMER & CRAIG RICE – People vs. Withers and Malone
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Reviews[13] Comments
by Bill Pronzini & George Kelley:
STUART PALMER & CRAIG RICE – People vs. Withers and Malone. Simon & Schuster, hardcover, 1963. Paperback reprints: Award A146F, 1965; International Polygonics, 1991.
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 Motiveâ€). 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.â€
———
Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

[UPDATE] 08-09-09. The following comment was left by Jeffrey Marks on Yahoo’s Golden Age of Detection group, and is reprinted here with his permission. Jeff is the author of Who Was That Lady? Craig Rice: The Queen of the Screwball Mystery (Delphi Books, 2001).
“Rice had indicated that although she had not known Palmer when she began the Malone series, Palmer epitomized the character — she thought Palmer resembled him in mannerism, appearance and dress.
“So she didn’t have a lot of qualms in turning him over to Palmer to write stories. Palmer made a few minor changes to the character. Malone, who had just been a rumpled dresser, now wore colorful ties and nicer suits. Other than that, Malone stayed close to Rice’s version of the lawyer.
“Rice was very uninvolved in the movie as well, being a ward of the state when it was being made. She was able to use the money to get out of debt and get control of her finances back as well.â€
August 7th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
It’s hard for me to be balanced and fair about this book because it is one I simply love. I make no claims for it being perfect, but it is great fun, and such a good example of the mad cap screwball mystery school that serious criticism seems pointless, like trying to decide which meringue is lighter.
According to Palmer these were all written by him with only a little input from Rice, and if so he does a hell of a job writing Malone, his secretary Maggie, and his nemesis/Lestrade Captain Von Flannagan.
I would have to call “Once Upon a Train” not only the best story in the book, but a model novella that could be used to teach how these should be written. In some ways the novella length was the ideal one for the mystery, and this is a blueprint of how it should be done.
August 7th, 2009 at 8:24 pm
Perhaps I had enough of Ma and Pa Kettle when I was growing up, but when I watched the MRS. O’MALLEY AND MR. MALONE movie a couple of years ago, Marjorie Main’s voice and other mannerisms simply drove me up a wall.
How well does the film version follow the story? Any resemblance? If so, maybe I ought to give it another chance.
Or better yet, I’ll read the book the next chance I get.
— Steve
August 7th, 2009 at 11:09 pm
Mrs. O’Malley and Mr. Malone is a mixed bag. On one hand it would be hard to be more annoying than Marjorie Main in this picture, and on the other it would be tough to find a better actor to play Malone than James Whitmore (though Pat O’Brien, Lee Tracy, and Brian Donlevy were all good in the role).
In general the movie strays toward the plot of the novella, but Main’s presence is so grating and out of place that it keeps unbalancing the whole thing. Still, even with that it’s a good story and Whitmore is a great Malone — alas minus the Withers he deserves. Otherwise good cast though, with Ann Dvorak, Fred Clark, Dorothy Malone, and Phyllis Kirk.
When I met Whitmore in college when he was touring with his one man Will Rogers show I asked him about the film and mostly he talked about how odd Main was. She frequently talked to her dead husband — sometimes in mid scene — and was a total germophobe. He did admit though he used a little bit of Malone years later when he did the series The Law and Mr. Jones where he played attorney Abraham Lincoln Jones.
Recently TCM has run a short documentary on Main where Whitmore tells some of the same stories about her.
August 8th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
This is one of my all-time favorite Palmer books. Everything the review says about good plot, sleuths and humor is true!
PS. Don’t remember the movie well – but recall finding it very dull, and utterly unlike the book in tone. Can’t remember the film’s plot, whether it was close to the book’s or not.
Here is one case where the book is definitely better than the movie!
August 8th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
If you’ve never read Palmer, and are looking for places to start among books in print, please try:
The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla
Hildegarde Withers: Uncollected Riddles
I THINK that “People Vs Withers and Malone” is out of print. But it should be available cheap in old used paperbacks. It too is a great place to start reading Palmer.
February 23rd, 2016 at 1:25 am
Note the date of this comment: 2/22/2016.
A little bit of a latecomer, I know.
Not long ago, I read a book called Elvis’s Favorite Director, by Michael A. Hoey.
It’s a biography of Norman Taurog, the pioneering Hollywood director who was Hoey’s mentor when he entered the movie business.
Taurog’s place here is as the director of Mrs. O’Malley And Mr. Malone.
In Taurog’s account via Hoey, it was MGM’s intention to use the Hildegarde Withers character, but RKO, which retained the movie rights to the character, wouldn’t let them.
This forced MGM to change the character to “Hattie O’Malley”.
The casting of Marjorie Main further led MGM to make “Mrs. O’M” into a Ma Kettle clone; it seems that MGM, which had Main under contract, wanted Main to have a series at the home studio, where they could make all the money (the Kettles were made on loan-out to Universal).
Oddity: in real-life, Marjorie Main was a New Englander, who away from the cameras was as prim as Ma Kettle was raucous; she could probably have played Hildegarde Withers as Stuart Palmer had written her – not far from her real self – but MGM played it safe.
O’Malley/Malone (per Taurog and Hoey) got mainly favorable reviews (from reviewers who weren’t familiar with the original), and did respectable programmer box-office. MGM was ready to go for a series, but Craig Rice sold the rights to John J. Malone to ABC-TV, and there went that plan.
So that’s that story.
I put it here because this post is most directly connected with the property; maybe later I’ll find a more recent one that would have been a better choice, but there you are … and here I am.
… and as they say, better late (almost seven years!) than never.
February 23rd, 2016 at 2:26 pm
Those of us who RSS the comments appreciate it. Actually, I am used to returning to my old posts to answer a comment for someone who had googled the subject and discovers us.
I knew the story about how O’Malley teamed up with Malone but the thought it was to be a series is news to me. My only thought is how lucky Malone fans such as I are that Rice sold the TV rights to Malone to ABC (the radio version had been dropped by NBC in July 1951 and the ABC TV version began in Sept 1951).
For my review of the Malone radio series check here https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=10076
February 23rd, 2016 at 2:52 pm
The original date of this post was Friday, 7 August 2009. This is the first time I’ve done this, but since I felt the information you’ve added, Mike, was as interesting as it is, I’ve decided to move this review up to the front of the blog.
It’s worth making sure more people have a chance to read it, in other words, rather than leaving it in limbo or a happenstance Google search.
February 23rd, 2016 at 3:34 pm
Steve,
Thanks for moving this forward so I could read Mike’s comments. Explains a good deal about this film.
February 23rd, 2016 at 4:56 pm
I also took the opportunity to add two more cover images and a much larger one of the movie poster.
And while I still haven’t, I would like to see the movie again. I don’t think I appreciated it nearly as much as I should have.
February 23rd, 2016 at 8:59 pm
Full-Service Nerd:
– The Taurog biography, my source for this, was the fourth and final book written by Michael A. Hoey, who passed away last year.
The first three (all worth your attention):
– Inside Fame On Television, about the series that Hoey worked on, as editor, director, and sometime producer.
– Elvis, Sherlock, And Me, a general autobiography of a life spent on the movie-TV biz, with much of interest for patrons of this site.
– Sherlock Holmes & The Fabulous Faces, Hoey’s tribute to his father, Dennis Hoey (aka Lestrade), director Roy William Neill, and anybody and everybody who had anything to do with the Universal Holmes movies of the ’40s.
The Fame book is from McFarland; the other three are from BearManor Media; all are worth your time.
– Mrs. O’Malley And Mr. Malone is available on Warner Archive DVD, paired with Having Wonderful Crime (Pat O’Brien as Malone and George Murphy and Carole Landis as the Justuses).
Also available from the same source:
Hildegarde Withers Mystery Collection, the six RKOs all nicely restored.
February 26th, 2016 at 8:55 pm
Steve, I have only a vague recollection of writing this essay. Bill Pronzini gets all the credit for making it better.
February 26th, 2016 at 9:08 pm
Collaborations often bring out the best of both parties.