Stuart Palmer (born June 21, 1905 and died February 4, 1968) was a talented mystery novelist and screenwriter. He was most famous for creating the character Hildegarde Withers. In addition, he used the pen names Theodore Orchards and Jay Stewart. for some of his works. Summary Palmer was born in Baraboo, Wisconsin in 1905. He was reportedly descended from some of the earliest English colonists and held a variety of odd jobs before turning to fiction." From 1928 to 1931, Palmer was a frequent contributor (sometimes using the pen name Theodore Orchards) to Ghost Stories magazine, writing short stories, essays, and a serialized novel, The Gargoyle's Throat. Palmer tried his hand at writing a murder mystery with The Penguin Pool Murder, published in 1931 and filmed the following year by RKO Radio Pictures. Character actress Edna May Oliver starred as Palmer's heroine, Hildegarde Withers, a spinster schoolteacher who was an amateur sleuth—something of an American version of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, although considerably more comic and caustic. He later admitted that he modeled Hildegarde after his former high school teacher, a Miss Fern Hakett. The casting of Oliver for the role was a coincidence, as Palmer had been influenced by her performance in the Broadway production of Show Boat when creating the character. The film was a hit and Oliver starred in two more Withers films, but she left RKO in 1935. Helen Broderick and ZaSu Pitts played Withers in another three films. A made-for-TV movie, A Very Missing Person, aired in 1972, starring Eve Arden as Withers. This first novel inspired Palmer to collect pictures and statues of penguins and create a personal trademark featuring one of these birds." Palmer wrote fourteen Hildegarde Withers novels, including Murder on the Blackboard (1932), Murder on Wheels (1932), The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree (1934), Four Lost Ladies (1949), and Cold Poison (1954), set in the thinly disguised Walter Lantz animation studio. The short-story collection People vs. Withers and Malone (1963) was a collaboration with Craig Rice, in which Hildegarde Withers was teamed with Rice's hard-drinking lawyer detective J.J. Malone; one of the stories, "Once Upon A Train, or The Loco Motive," was the basis for the movie Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone (1950). Hildegarde Withers Makes the Scene (1969) was completed by Fletcher Flora upon Palmer's death and published posthumously. Palmer also featured Withers in dozens of short stories that were