With Phoebe Atwood Taylor's first Leonidas Witherall mystery, Beginning With a Bash, taking the spotlight in this week's Classic Mysteries podcast, I thought it might be fun to go back into the vault and see what I had to say about the eighth and last Leonidas Witherall mystery, The Iron Clew, when I reviewed it nearly a decade ago. The Iron Clew was first published in 1947, ten years after Witherall's first appearance in Beginning With a Bash. By the time the series ended, Witherall had acquired quite a group of friends and semi-regular characters, was again first teaching at and then running a boys' school, and was following a formula which still gets laughs (and thrills) even today. Here's what I had to say on my podcast review about that first book, edited to update availability information:
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It was not exactly a routine and quiet evening for Leonidas Witherall. While he was changing clothes to go out for dinner, somebody burgled his house. When he got to the dinner, he found his host murdered. He also found himself the prime suspect. As Bette Davis observed in the movie All About Eve, “Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night!” And what a night it turns out to be, in The Iron Clew, by Phoebe Atwood Taylor.
Phoebe Atwood Taylor wrote two series of crime novels. On earlier podcasts, I’ve discussed a few of her books about Asey Mayo, the so-called “Codfish Sherlock,” who lives and works on Cape Cod. There’s a fair amount of humor in those books, but they’re primarily solid mysteries.
And then there’s the series she wrote, under the pen name “Alice Tilton,” about Leonidas Witherall – by the way, I’m pronouncing Leonidas like that, because, in The Iron Clew, he expresses some contempt for someone who pronounces it Leon-NIGH-das. Anyway, these books are more thriller than mystery, but they are, above all, slapstick comedies.
The Iron Clew, like the other Witherall mysteries, is written pretty much to formula: Witherall, who is in charge of a boys’ school in the Boston suburbs, is more-or-less secretly the author of a series of lurid penny dreadful thrillers about the exploits of one Lieutenant Haseltine. In the course of each book, Witherall – who, by the way, looks exactly like the classic image of William Shakespeare, beard and all, and is frequently called “Bill” by other characters, - Witherall is involved, thanks to what he calls the “old octopus of fate,” in a murder that sounds like it came right out of the pages of one of his novels. He is usually in a position of having to clear himself of the murder, and he does so, staying one step ahead of the police, and usually aided by an unlikely assortment of strange local characters. Almost every chapter ends in a cliffhanger which is quickly resolved, and, ultimately, Witherall solves the crime, to the extreme gratitude of the local police. And at the end, he discovers that he now has material for his next novel about Lieutenant Haseltine.
Quite clearly the Witherall books are more thrillers than puzzle mysteries – and, equally clearly, they are meant to be images of the books written by Witherall himself. They require more than a little suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader. But the action is usually non-stop, Witherall’s escapes (in all the books) are usually razor-thin, and the situations are far more comic than they are threatening. It’s sort of like Bulldog Drummond slipping on banana peels and equipped with a squirt gun.
The Iron Clew fits right into the pattern. It begins with Leonidas Witherall at home, trying to write a new book about Lieutenant Haseltine. He stops writing in late afternoon and goes upstairs to change for a dinner at the home of a local bank official. When he comes back downstairs, he discovers that someone has broken into his house, apparently to steal a package containing a very dry bank report. The situation quickly escalates to the point where Witherall chases after the presumed burglar and winds up being pursued by police himself – not at all an unusual occurrence in these books.
Rescued from that situation, he arrives for his dinner with the bank official – but finds him dead, with the murder weapon a heavy bust of Shakespeare, given to the victim by Witherall himself. He quickly becomes the number one suspect. The rest of the book consists of his efforts to stay in front of the police, while an unlikely series of passersby work with him to help him solve the case and escape from his pursuers. All this in the midst of a freak snowstorm. Sure, why not?
Quite clearly, we’re not dealing with excessive realism, or the grim streets, or psychodrama here. We’re dealing with good old fashioned, perils-of-Pauline thrillers, crossed with the Keystone Kops, where the action moves far too quickly to allow such minor considerations as logic to play much of a role. And I say that without meaning it as a putdown – for Phoebe Atwood Taylor was a very talented and wickedly funny writer, and there’s a great deal of humor in the story – not to mention the ever-changing picture of Leonidas Witherall, as William Shakespeare, or as the dignified headmaster of a boys’ school, or the author of a wildly successful series of thrillers, as he tries to figure out who murdered whom – and why he appears to be taking the blame for it.
While Phoebe Atwood Taylor’s stories about Asey Mayo have been fairly easy to find in bookstores [no longer really the case, alas! -ed.], the stories about Leonidas Witherall have mostly been harder to get. So it’s nice to see that some of them, at least, are back in print. That includes The Iron Clew, which, as I said earlier, is a good representative of all the novels about this most peculiar sleuth. If you turn off your disbelief and are prepared to laugh at the often ridiculous situations, I think you’ll enjoy it a lot.
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To listen to the original podcast review, please click here.
Next week: The Moving Toyshop, by Edmund Crispin.
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