Crusty schoolteacher / sleuth Hildegarde Withers can't escape mysterious deaths even on a trans-Atlantic crossing on an ocean liner. En route to England she spends part of her time (when not feeling queasy) sizing up her fellow passengers. Her intuition helps when passengers and crew start droppi...
To clear a veteran’s name, Miss Withersinvestigates a society murder The war in Europe is over, and America’s fighting men are coming home. Lieutenant Pat Montague spent the war dreaming of a return to his beloved: society princess Helen Abbott. But when Uncle Sam finally lets him go, Pat finds ...
“I got instructions to send all the teachers in there [in Room 1A] as they get here, and to send the kids home. Only the kids say they want to stay and see the fun.”“I’ll settle that quickly enough,” Miss Withers promised. She turned around and faced the swarm, clapping her hands for silence.“Chi...
School teacher Hildegarde Withers and her policeman boyfriend Oscar Piper go to a bullfight in Mexico and end up in the middle of a murder.
—BYRON IT WAS SOME TIME before Miss Withers, who hadn’t giggled in forty years, could quite contain herself. The picture of the two hereditary enemies struggling to extricate themselves from their accidental embrace outside her door had been a little too much, even for her. Of course it had all b...
“Sorry to intrude,” Miss Withers said, “but I haven’t any use for this thing after all, and I thought you might like to add it to your collection of Mexican curios.” She held out the great six-foot bow of ash, with its beads and colored windings in the ancient formal fashions of the Toltecs. “Why...
MAUDE THWAITE WAS saying, “I’m going to try it.” She was stalking up and down the office, her hands stuck deep in the pockets of her well-worn riding breeches. Her husband was engaged in the delicate operation of squeezing pomade from a tiny lead tube, which he then daubed thickly upon the twiste...
—P. T. Barnum IT WAS ONE O’CLOCK NOW, and Howie Rook hastily wound his way through the maze of tents and machinery and trucks, looking for the domain of the clowns, the place called Clown Alley. He tried to take what he thought was a short cut—and found himself in the horse-top. Here he rashly de...
She knew that a large majority of the world’s citizens awaken by slow degrees, with resistance at a low ebb, and whenever she found it necessary to determine a culprit among her pupils at Jefferson School she made the accusation bright and early the next morning as the boys and girls were filing ...
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE RAIN IN CALIFORNIA IS like rain nowhere else in the world. Let it come down for half an hour, and it seems that it has been raining forever and ever. And that it must continue until half-past Eternity. Over the lovely if artificial landscape, over the bright houses and the rou...
IN THE OFFICE AT CENTRE Street Headquarters where Inspector Oscar Piper kept his desk and hung his hat, the phone began to ring. The inspector, suffocating in a welter of the administrative chores that he still considered an unreasonable imposition, came up for air and grabbed the noisy instrumen...
After much difficulty in falling asleep she awakened with a start to see something white and ghastly slip across her room and disappear into the wall. “Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!” she said aloud. “Don’t tell me it’s a ghost!” The apparition obligingly repeated itself and she realiz...
The swarms of natives, tourists, and summer people had wisely distributed themselves between the beaches, the glass-bottomed boats, the Aviary, and their hotel rooms, leaving only a blistering Main Street, a solitary red bus, and an angular and determined lady who engaged the driver of that bus i...
—Cervantes 10. EVEN AS THE KEY TURNED IN the hall door, Talleyrand knew with a poodle’s sixth sense that something was wrong. He yawned, wagged a tentative tail, and hastily began to search his conscience. True, there was the matter of the tom-up newspaper, but he had already had his scolding for...
FORTY-EIGHT HOURS LATER, almost to the dot, Miss Withers crawled out of the sidecar of the Hog. The simple action, completed with as much dignity as was possible, filled her with a vague sadness, an abortive nostalgia. She had actually grown irrationally attached to the treacherous vehicle, and m...