The month of June, when secondary schools are getting ready for the summer vacation may be a good time to reflect on great fictional teachers who manage to combine detective skills with pedagogical ones. I'm thinking of one teacher in particular, a New Yorker with a sharp and inquisitive mind, and a taste for mystery that irritates her good friend, a New York City detective, who nevertheless finds much to admire in her ability to solve tough puzzles. I'm talking, of course, about Hildegarde Withers, the creation of mystery author Stuart Palmer, the good friend of Inspector Oscar Piper, and the delight of readers. I've reviewed several of Palmer's mysteries on the podcast over the years (and I really need to start looking for some other books about Hildy that we can discuss here). Here's one of my favorites, Murder on the Blackboard. As usual, I've done some editing - in this case, primarily to update information about the book's availability:
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Nobody ever said that being a teacher was easy. That was just as true back in 1932 as it is today. In fact, in some ways, it may have been more difficult. For example, the women who taught at the Jefferson School in New York City ran the risk of losing their jobs if they got married, because the board of directors of the school wanted to keep the jobs open for unmarried women whom they thought needed it more. The kids were no bargain, either. And the usual petty rivalries and jealousies were additional irritants. But when it came to murder – and it did – well, enough was enough. Which is why Hildegarde Withers set out to solve the case of Murder on the Blackboard, by Stuart Palmer.
1932 was a tough year. The depression was under way. Franklin D. Roosevelt wasn’t elected president until the end of the year, so there were plenty of bitter jokes about Herbert Hoover still floating around. And Prohibition, which almost completely outlawed the sale of liquor and wine, was still the law, even if it was largely ignored in places like New York City, the scene for Stuart Palmer’s third novel about Miss Withers, called Murder on the Blackboard.
Actually, Miss Withers got involved in this particular case because she had decided to keep one of her young students for detention after school. As a result, instead of going home for the night, she discovers the body of another schoolteacher who has been murdered across the hall from Hildy’s classroom. She immediately calls in her friend, Inspector Oscar Piper of the New York City Homicide Bureau. But by the time he arrives, the body has disappeared. And, as he pursues clues into the building’s basement, he is whacked on the head and winds up in the hospital for the remainder of the book – leaving Hildy to try to work with a largely incompetent assortment of police officers to investigate the murder of the teacher and the near-murder of Inspector Piper.
The police are pretty certain they know who committed the crime. Hildy is not so sure…and, to nobody’s surprise, she turns out to be right…though she needs the help of Inspector Piper to get the proof they need to solve the case.
It’s important to remember that the Hildegarde Withers mysteries often were almost as much about humor and nonsense as they were about the murders and other crimes. Most of the humor here is fairly grim, as the murder itself and its aftermath are fairly horrific. A lot of the humor can be found in the characters of the police officers, who are perhaps less than the ideal representatives of the law. For example, there’s a pair of oafish plainclothes detectives from downtown named Allen and Burns. Allen and Burns. Do you remember the old-time comedy team of Burns and Allen – George Burns and Gracie Allen? By the time this book was written, they had parlayed a successful comedy career in vaudeville into regular appearances on the radio, and the names Burns and Allen were pretty much synonymous with screwball dizzy comedy – so naming two pretty incompetent detectives Allen and Burns would have made a lot of sense to readers in 1932.
As for Hildy herself, Stuart Palmer has this description of her:
"For those of my readers who are meeting Hildegarde Withers for the first time, let me inform them that she is in the neighborhood of forty – the close neighborhood – and that her face has something of the contour, and most of the characteristics, of a well-bred horse.”
That’s enough of a picture for me. But Hildy, if she is strict and frequently overbearing – particularly when she’s hunting for a killer with very little real help – is a very endearing character, and the public loved Palmer’s books about her.
Many of the other characters are quite memorable as well. There’s the school janitor, the man whom the police are convinced is the killer. Hildy is not; she sees him as a man with an excessive taste for bootleg liquor, and as a man who holds some of the keys to the mystery – but not as a killer. There are other teachers and staff members in the school – some quite loveable, others less so. There’s a psychoanalyst from Vienna, intent on getting a starring role for himself as the man who captured the killer. He’s no match for Miss Withers. And there are plenty of others in the cast, enough to spread the suspicion around a bit. The reader is given a lot of the clues, but it’s nice to watch the final gambit played by Miss Withers and Inspector Piper which brings the book to a satisfying conclusion. And I should add that the method of the murder – only revealed at the end of the book – is one of the more unusual methods I’ve seen.
[The following is updated as of May, 2019. -ed.] Murder on the Blackboard is currently available in e-book editions. There seem to be a reasonable number of print editions available online and there is an Audible audiobook version as well. If you have never sat through a class with Miss Withers, you certainly should do so.
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There appears to be a DVD available as well with the movie version of Murder on the Blackboard and several other Miss Withers films too.
You can listen to the original audio version of the review by clicking here.
Next: Dead Men's Morris, by Gladys Mitchell.
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