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Nipped in the Bud

Page history last edited by Jon 14 years, 7 months ago

Palmer, Stuart - Nipped in the Bud

 

Palmer's Nipped in the Bud (1951) also makes entertaining reading. Partly this is due to the charm and humor of Palmer's storytelling. The book is similar in style to The Green Ace (1950), and the two novels make a diptych. In both, the personalities of Hildegarde Withers and Oscar Piper have reached a full, mature richness. In both works, Hildegarde and the Inspector never stop sleuthing. The continuous detective work is a gratifying reading experience.

 

Palmer has introduced a new character here, super defense attorney Sam Bordin. Palmer had already started collaborating with Craig Rice on tales that mix Withers' with Rice's attorney sleuth John J. Malone. Bordin is in many ways similar to Malone. Both have never lost a client, both cut legal corners in their clients' defense, both are flamboyant, both have long suffering secretaries and an eye for high living. It is as if Palmer liked the possibilities opened up by the Withers-Malone pairing, and wanted to have a similar character available in his own novels. Palmer also makes the Withers-Bordin combination more Malone like by having Withers and Bordin be old friends.

 

The appeal of Nipped in the Bud is also due to its plotting, which is unconventional. The reader is never quite sure exactly what sort of story he or she is reading. Is this a murder mystery; a hunt for a missing witness; a tale of legal shenanigans in preparation for a trial? The story could be any of the above, and it is not clear till the end what the real nature of the story is. Palmer's sustained ambiguity keeps the reader guessing. The story continuously oscillates between these poles, sometimes making it look like one of them, sometimes another. It is a very unusual approach. Palmer moves his characters through a strange labyrinth. While the end of the tale does not show puzzle plot brilliance, it does manage to tie up all the ends of the plot. Palmer is oddly helped in this by the breakdown in Golden Age conventions in the 1950's. In the 1930's, most crime books were formal mystery puzzles. By the 1950's, suspense tales were much more common, and it is perfectly plausible that Nipped in the Bud might be a tale of suspense or legal maneuvering.

 

The treatment of the characters' motivations is also deliberately mystifying. In many mystery stories, the characters all look slightly suspicious. Anyone of them could be the killer. By contrast, Nipped in the Bud is full of actions that demand explanations in terms of stark innocence or guilt. When a witness disappears, is she doing this out of fear? bribery? Does she have a guilty secret herself? An idealistic motive? Has someone deluded her with false ideas? Palmer constantly makes us wonder. These possible motives each move the interpretation of the story in a definitely different direction. There is something discrete about these alternatives, in the mathematical sense of the word. Unlike the guilt or innocence of a character in a conventional novel, which exists along a continuum in shades of gray, the various possible motives in Nipped in the Bud are all sharply separate from each other, like a choice between black and white.

 

Between the choices the reader is constantly being asked to make about what kind of novel this is, and the different interpretations that are put on the characters' motivations, Palmer has devised a novel that is frequently branching of into different directions. If one were to construct a diagram of the book, the best approach would be a 3D model using a set of Tinkertoys. Each colored stick would represent a different branch of the book's plot, which forks off in all directions making a three dimensional tree.

 

Nipped in the Bud contains many references to Sherlock Holmes. Withers employs a young Mexican boy Vito as an assistant; the novel points out that he is in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes' "Baker Street Irregulars". Charles B. Child introduced a similar Iraqi character into his Inspector Chafik stories. There is also the young black kid in William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust (1948). All these young detectives are members of minority races. They are a sign of the early Civil Rights era, and an attempt by their authors to introduce minority sleuths into fiction.

 

Palmer uses just a few settings for his tale. These include the apartment building where the murder is committed, the TV studio, the main suspect's parents' house; and the hotel where Hildegarde and the young women stay in Tijuana. This allows Palmer to build up the reality of his tale. Most of these spaces seem domestic: they are where people live everyday.

 

Nipped in the Bud marks the official move of Hildegarde from New York City to Southern California. Part of the book takes place in New York, but most in Tijuana, Mexico, across the border from California. From that point on, most of the Withers short stories and the one completed novel, Cold Poison (1954), have a Southern California setting.

 

Mike Grost


B

 

One of the trickiest of all Palmer’s books.  I’ve complained in the past that he writes, constructs and clues very well, but doesn’t conceal the murderer.  Here, it’s the opposite.  Palmer adopts an unusual approach—an apparently open-and-shut case (main suspect arrested and awaiting trial), and Miss Withers going to Mexico to hunt for the missing witness.  Not the usual “problem in deduction”.  This means it’s disappointing as a detective story—not enough spread of suspicion or plot complexity; it’s more like Quentin’s Puzzle for Puppets.  However, considered as misdirection, it’s excellent.  Palmer uses a double bluff: a wrong solution (similar idea to The Green Ace—***main suspect, already arrested, is guilty***), followed by a right one that had me completely fooled.  The ending is rather Raymond Chandleresque—***the innocent witness turns out to be a hard-boiled bad girl on the make***.  Also excellent is the way  in which everything turns out to be the opposite of what the reader assumed (whole story is a double plot), and ***the innocent Junior Gault and Dallas Trempleau’s belief that he is guilty***.

Would make a good film—were US stories influenced by Hollywood?  Palmer, of course, was a script-writer.

 

·        Poetical chapter headings—more arty?

·        Everyone thinks Ina Kell should be spanked

 

Nick Fuller.

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