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The Penguin Pool Murder

Page history last edited by Jon 12 years, 5 months ago

Palmer, Stuart - The Penguin Pool Murder (1932)

 

The first novel in the Withers series, The Penguin Pool Murder (1931), disappoints. Its atmospheric opening murder investigation in New York's Aquarium is pretty good, but there is not much of a puzzle plot to it, and the book gradually drifts off into mediocrity. It is disconcerting to see the Inspector treat Miss Withers as a murder suspect, and a lot of the characters are unlikable; the book is consistent with Palmer's later work in showing marriage and romance to be based on the most cynical and distasteful motives. The book has a horror atmosphere, like Murder on the Blackboard, and only a little of Palmer's trademark humor. I liked Palmer's sketch of the murder scene; like the art in his next two novels, it has an interesting schematic quality. Like them, it attributes the artwork to Hildegarde Withers herself.

 

Oddly enough, the movie version of the book mirror reverses the parity of the Aquarium: what goes from left to right in the book's illustration, goes from right to left in the film's sets. The novel is set in late 1929, shortly after the stock market crash; the murder victim was a stockbroker, and both the crash and the workings of the stock market are portrayed in the novel with some sophistication. It is unclear whether the novel was written then, and publication delayed till 1931, or whether Palmer set his book as a "historical novel in the recent past", always a somewhat unusual approach. Palmer sets much of the novel among the world of successful businessmen, perhaps because he is trying to follow the Van Dine tradition; but somehow he feels ill at ease among these characters.

 

Much is made in the book of the fashionable clothes worn by these wealthy men, and the chief clue actually revolves around men's hats. One senses in Palmer an uncomfortable mixture of admiration, envy and distaste for such businessmen. (Twenty years later, he is still expressing ambiguous attitudes towards businessmen in "The Jinx Man" (1952).) In later and better books Palmer will find much more of a niche among showbiz types, whether the rodeo and film buffs (Murder On Wheels), publishing ("The Riddle of the Brass Band"), burlesque ("The Riddle of the Forty Naughty Girls"), Hollywood scriptwriters (The Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan), vaudevillians (The Green Ace), early live TV (Nipped in the Bud), an animation factory (Cold Poison), or the circus (Unhappy Hooligan). He describes all of these types very well, and his novels form a sort of unofficial social history of the lower echelons of show business.

 

Mike Grost

 


Hildegarde Withers takes charge when a corpse takes swimming lessons in a penguin pool. Though written in dead of Golden Age, Penguin Pool is by no means a great piece of plotting. Culprit is easy to spot, and some elements of the plot are pills needing much water (from the pool?) to be swallowed. Appeal of the book is elsewhere. First of all, it introduces Miss Hildegarde Withers, whom entry is a memorable one, and PP would be a must - read for her alone, though Inspector Oscar Piper is worth price of the ticket as well. Also interesting is the cynical way Palmer deals with a quintessential cliché of Golden Age and later mystery fiction, that is, young lovers in jeopardy. Resolution of that some particular romance is as far as it gets from usual happy endings of the era. Finally, and the more important by far, Palmer is a born - storyteller, with a fiendish ability to catch reader's interest from the start and never letting it go. Even the most outrageous improbabilities can't keep you from turning pages and wanting for more. The result is great fun, an euphorizing read. If such a category as “feelgood mysteries” does exist, Penguin Pool for sure belongs to it. N.B.: I have serious doubts as to whether French translation is completely true to the original. Does Hildegarde and Piper really marry in the end?

 

Xavier Lechard

 

Mike Grost

 

See also: http://onlydetect.wordpress.com/2011/07/29/stuart-palmer-the-penguin-pool-murder-1931/

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