Let's face it: there are times (at least in mystery fiction) where it can be enormously helpful to have a persistent and meddlesome old battleaxe on hand to help an errant police inspector. Certainly that's true in Stuart Palmer's Golden Age classic, "The Puzzle Of The Blue Banderilla," which is the subject of this week's review on the Classic Mysteries podcast. As always, you can listen to the full review here.
The battleaxe in question is Hildegarde Withers, the intrepid and acerbic schoolteacher who has an irritating habit of helping her good friend, New York City homicide inspector Oscar Piper, when he gets caught up in a murder case that threatens to find him out of his normal depths. In "The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla," Inspector Piper is traveling through Mexico when a young customs inspector is murdered by sniffing some cheap perfume - found in the luggage of one of Inspector Piper's traveling party. It gets worse when another person dies, stabbed to death with a blue banderilla, a crude tool used by bullfighters. Fortunately, Miss Withers is on hand to help sort everything out. All of this is wrapped into a fairly lighthearted and quite enjoyable mystery, very much in the Golden Age tradition.
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