People vs Withers and Malone

$50 · Offered by Book Collector Inc

Author: Palmer, Stuart (1905-1968) and Craig Rice Year: 1963 Publisher: Simon and Schuster Place: New York Description: 254 pages. (8" x 5 1/2") bound in original publisher's quarter beige cloth with black brown lettering to spine and decorate square with initial to cover over red marbled boards in original pictorial jacket. Introduction by by Ellery Queen. First edition. Intermittently from the late Forties into the early Sixties, Palmer and his good friend and fellow mystery writer Craig Rice, with whom he had worked on the scripting of the 1942 film The Falcon's Brother , collaborated on half a dozen novelettes for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine . Each story teams the crusty Miss Withers, that "tall, angular person who somehow suggested a fairly well-dressed scarecrow," with Rice's hard-drinking, womanizing Chicago lawyer, John J. Malone. And all six are collected in this volume. Working in tandem, Withers and Malone solve what the dust-jacket blurb describes as "hectic, hilarious homicides." A fair assessment: Both Palmer and Rice wrote cleverly constructed, fair-play whodunits flavored with (sometimes wacky) humor, and the blending of their talents produced some memorable stories. One is the title novelette, in which Hildegarde and John J. hunt for a missing witness in the murder trial of a Malone client and wind up pulling off some courtroom pyrotechnics to rival any in the Perry Mason canon. In "Cherchez la Frame," the two sleuths travel to Hollywood to look for the m

• Binding: Hardcover

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.