Leonidas Witherall - onetime professor at a boys' school, now the janitor at a bookstore, thanks to the Great Depression - has one distinguishing characteristic that sets him apart from many others in a similar predicament: he looks exactly like William Shakespeare. Well, he looks exactly like we all think Shakespeare looked, thanks to various paintings and statuary busts and such. In fact, almost everyone he meets calls him "Bill." But Witherall is a man who believes in justice, in truth, and in his friends. So when a young man named Martin Jones is accused of murder and carted off from the bookstore by the Boston police, Leonidas Witherall sets out to solve the murder and prove that the police are wrong and Martin Jones is innocent. All of which forms the basis for a book that really can only be described as a screwball mystery - half thriller and half zany comedy. It's called Beginning With a Bash, a 1937 classic by Phoebe Atwood Taylor (writing as "Alice Tilton" ). It's the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here.
Phoebe Atwood Taylor is remembered today primarily for her two dozen mysteries about a Cape Cod handyman named Asey Mayo, known (in the books, anyway) as “the codfish Sherlock.” Asey had a great sideline: he could solve complicated and often quite funny mysteries. In addition to those two dozen books about Asey Mayo, however, Taylor also wrote eight books featuring Leonidas Witherall. These books were all more screwball comedy than mystery, although there were all kinds of thriller elements along with slapstick humor. Usually, Witherall would sort of stumble into a murder case, where either he himself or a trusted friend would be accused of murder. He’d spend the next couple of hundred pages going from crisis to crisis, evading police and other pursuers – just when you (and he) would breathe a sigh of relief for his narrow escape, he’d lurch into another predicament and have to think up a good (and usually quite funny) way out.
I’m hesitant even to attempt any kind of synopsis, because the book is non-stop action (and, for most readers, I suspect, non-stop laughter) and just keeps everyone running from the first page (where we meet Martin Jones, nearly freezing in his thin flannel suit, wandering into the bookstore for warmth) to the last (where various groups of villains, properly trussed up, are delivered to the amazed police). In the intervening couple of hundred pages, you will find:
A couple of murders;
A theft of 40 thousand dollars’ worth of bonds;
At least two competing street gangs, each group trying to kill the other gang’s leaders;
A number of street-level police, mostly not over-endowed with common sense or intelligence;
A couple of really murderous villains; believe me, you’ll know them when you see them;
Several young women with the proverbial "hearts of gold";
A number of Boston buildings loaded with convenient secret passages (which make great ways to get away from cops or gangsters, as needed – or maybe not).
And all that's just for starters. It’s wonderfully complex. If you think that even murder can have a humorous side, and that a little slapstick never hurt anyone, try Phoebe Atwood Taylor’s Beginning with a Bash. At the moment, it’s most widely available in e-book format, although your own favorite mystery bookstore and/or Amazon’s booksellers do seem to have some relatively inexpensive paper copies available.
Comments