The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan

By Stuart Palmer

Book Overview

Hildegarde Withers is just your average school teacher--with above-average skills in the art of deduction. The New Yorker often finds herself investigating crimes led only by her own meddlesome curiosity, though her friends on the NYPD don't mind when she solves their cases for them. After plans for a grand tour of Europe are interrupted by Germany's invasion of Poland, Miss Withers heads to sunny Los Angeles instead, where her vacation finds her working as a technical advisor on the set of a film adaptation of the Lizzie Borden story. The producer has plans for an epic retelling of the historical killer's patricidal spree--plans which are derailed when a screenwriter turns up dead. While the local authorities quickly deem his death accidental, Withers suspects otherwise and calls up a detective back home for advice. The two soon team up to catch a wily killer.

At once a pleasantly complex locked room mystery and a hilarious look at the foibles of Hollywood, The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan finds Palmer, a screenwriter himself, at his most perceptive. Reprinted for the first time in over thirty years, this riotously funny novel shows why Hildegarde Withers was among the most beloved detectives of the Golden Age American mystery novel.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1613161042
• ISBN13: 9781613161043
• Release Date: October 2018
• Publisher: American Mystery Classics
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Hildegarde in Hollywood

Schoolteacher Hildegarde Withers is taking a well-earned holiday in Hollywood, when she is surprised to be offered a job as a production expert on a new picture about Lizzie Borden (she is worried the producer might imagine she was a contemporary of Miss Borden's). No sooner has she settled into her new office than the writer in the office next to her dies mysteriously, apparently having broken his neck. Naturally, Miss Withers starts to investigate, and it seems that the murderer is intent on making her his next victim, much to the dismay of Hildegarde's old friend Inspector Piper of the New York police. This is another delightful and funny murder mystery, with an intriguing plot and some very colourful characters, especially the eccentric movie producer Thorwald L. Nincom, who is intent on finding the perfect Lizzie Borden, and quite unhampered by any question of historical accuracy in his picture. Miss Withers is more succesful at solving murders than at persuading Mr Nincom that Shirley Temple would not make a great Lizzie Borden. This is possibly the funnist Miss Withers story of all.