Palmer, Stuart - The Green Ace

The Green Ace (1950) is a late entry in the series of detective novels featuring Hildegarde Withers. This is one of those books, like Freeman's The Mystery of Angelina Frood (1922), in which, at the solution, every clue that the reader has been laboriously following turns out to be faked by the criminal, the product of a lie, or simply irrelevant. In these books the solution seems to have little to do with the clues the detective work previously dredged up. Sometimes this approach is good, but usually it just seems annoying to me, almost like a cheat. At least Freeman's book is one in which the solution contains a "thundering surprise" in compensation, to quote a phrase of John Dickson Carr, but Palmer's book has nothing that ingenious. Palmer's solution is logical, legitimate and fair, but it is certainly not very creative. Since the puzzle plot of The Green Ace is disappointing, I should supposedly be giving a thumbs down to the book. Actually, I enjoyed reading it very much. Palmer is a good storyteller, and I enjoyed spending time with Miss Withers and Inspector Piper. There is a background of cheap showbiz in the tale, something Palmer does very well, and I also liked the descriptions of the operations of the New York police. This book is a political landmark in Palmer's fiction as well: in The Green Ace, Palmer pointedly speaks out in favor of racial integration.

The Green Ace (1950) might be an influence on Truman Capote's novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958). Although the murder victim is never on stage in Palmer's book, she is the much discussed central presence of the novel. The murder victim in The Green Ace is a young show girl, very attractive to a series of men, who has much in common with Capote's Holly Golightly. Both have a similar secret in their past. The Green Ace also contains scenes set at Sing-Sing and Tiffany's, two locales in Capote's novella. (In both works, a woman visits an inmate at the prison. How many works of world literature contain both Sing-Sing and Tiffany's as a location? It must be a vanishingly small number.) There is also a young man from a well to do family, who has to cope with his stuffy family's ideas of marriage in both works (Palmer's is from Philadelphia's Main Line, Capote's is a Brazilian diplomat). A dog is an important character in Palmer, a cat in Capote.

Mike Grost

A genuine discovery (and probably the first since - er - Reginald Hill in 2001). Miss Withers, the spinster detective, is much more active than Miss Marple or Miss Silver, and, with her gusto hands-on approach to detection and habit of calling everyone 'child', is a bit like Mrs Croc. She's a lot of fun: she impersonates a condemned man's wife when she visits a prison and nearly gets arrested; visits a night club and startles everyone by her inaccurate grasp of 'modern' slang; is put in an asylum when she tries to take control of a siege; and is arrested for stealing from a department store. But she isn't a figure of fun - she's intelligent and morally upright, and, however much she may irritate Inspector Piper, both he and the reader respect her. No mean feat to create a detective who is both comic AND serious.

The detective plot is excellent. It reminded me of the glory days of Carr, Queen and Van Dine (in the US) - not as elaborate or hyper-ingenious, but with the same maddening 'Whodunnit?' pull. I suspected the right murderer at the start - only for Miss Withers to consider and reject my carefully nursed theory halfway through, so of course I rejected it, too! I then worked out an elaborate false theory (with several holes in it) - only for Miss Withers to show that I'd been right at the start. Excellent. 4/5.

Nick Fuller