Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone (1950).

Based on "Once upon a Train, or the Loco Motive" (1950) by Stuart Palmer and Craig Rice, the comic Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone features Marjorie Main as a radio contest winner and James Whitmore as a lawyer who stumble over constant corpses on their train to New York. Note the sleuths are handcuffed together a la Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll in The 39 Steps.

X Marks the Spot (1942).

Author Stuart Palmer,
U-Wisc Class of 1928. U-Wisc
Alumni Magazine Dec 1934

In this film, a private detective who is also an army lieutenant pursues the killer of his policeman father and discovers traffickers in rubber. One of the film's screenwriters is Stuart Palmer (creator of spinster sleuth Hildegarde Withers).

Podcasts on mystery films, Warner Archive.

The latest episode of the Warner Archive Collection podcast discusses the release of Bill Elliott Detective Mysteries (1955–57), a DVD of films with Elliott as a detective working in the LA sheriff's office:

• Calling Homicide (a police officer's death is connected to the murder of a head of a modeling school)

• Chain of Evidence (man with amnesia faces murder charges)

• Dial Red-O (disturbed veteran is accused of killing his wife)

• Footsteps in the Night (Elliott on the trail of a strangler)

• Sudden Danger (son seeks his father's murderer)

Other podcast episodes include:

• Episode on Terror on a Train (1953, with Glenn Ford) and The Decks Ran Red (1958, with James Mason and Dorothy Dandridge)

• Interview with Eddie Muller on the noir film Gun Crazy (1950)

• Episode on The Mask of Dimitrios (1944, from the novel by Eric Ambler), A Dangerous Profession (1949), Duffy of San Quentin (1954), The Fall Guy (1947, from Cornell Woolrich's "Cocaine"/"C-Jag"), FBI Code 98 (1963), and Loophole (1954)

• Episode on the Hildegarde Withers Mystery Collection that features the spinster detective created by Stuart Palmer and popularized by Edna May Oliver

More Hildegarde Withers from Rue Morgue Press.

Edna May Oliver, who
played Hildegarde Withers
in three films, NYPL

Rue Morgue Press has just issued another volume in the series featuring Stuart Palmer's Hildegarde Withers, Murder on the Blackboard (1932), in which the inquisitive schoolteacher-sleuth goes on a hunt for a peripatetic corpse. This book joins other Rue Morgue reissues in the Withers series: The Penguin Pool Murder, Miss Withers Regrets, Nipped in the Bud, The Puzzle of the Blue Banderilla, The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree, and The Puzzle of the Silver Persian.

Hildegarde Withers returns.

Welcome reissues from Rue Morgue Press include The Puzzle of the Silver Persian (1934) by Stuart Palmer, in which Hildegarde Withers, the intrepid schoolteacher-sleuth, encounters murder on a passenger ship. Also out:  The Yellow Violet (1942) by Frances Crane and Corpse Diplomatique (1950) by Delano Ames, not to mention the sorely needed reissues of the works of Manning Coles, such as Drink to Yesterday (1940).

About the image: Edna May Oliver, who played Hildegarde Withers in three films, NYPL.