As I promised during our last visit to the Classic Mysteries vault, I'm planning today to introduce (or re-introduce) you to a most unlikely detective named Leonidas Witherall. An ex-schoolmaster sidelined by the Great Depression, he stars in eight mysteries written by New England author Phoebe Atwood Taylor, writing under the name "Alice Tilton." Under her own name, Phoebe Atwood Taylor wrote some two dozen mysteries set on Cape Cod and featuring Asey Mayo, a keen-witted and down-to-earth individual whose detective adventures frequently veered off into comic escapades. But the books she wrote as Alice Tilton are in a class by themselves - think "Sherlock Holmes and the Marx Brothers meet the Keystone Kops." So for a few minutes, put aside those angst-filled protagonists of so many modern novels and meet Leonidas Witherall. Here's the script for the audio review I wrote for the first Witherall mystery, Beginning with a Bash (as usual slightly edited to update):
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To the police, it looked like a pretty simple case of murder. When they arrived at Peters’ Second-Hand Book Store, they found the dead body of the very disagreeable Professor John North. They also found Martin Jones, a young man whom they had been chasing around Boston all day. They had suspected him of stealing forty thousand dollars’ worth of bonds from Professor North – and now it seems that Jones had run into the professor in the book store and bashed him over the head, killing him. Easy. They promptly arrested Martin for the murder. And then, Leonidas Witherall got involved. Leonidas Witherall, formerly distinguished professor at a boys’ school. Leonidas Witherall, now – thanks to the great depression which was well under way – a janitor at that book store. Leonidas Witherall, whose most vivid distinguishing physical characteristic is that he looks like the old paintings and illustrations of William Shakespeare, which is why just about everybody who comes into contact with him starts calling him “Bill.” Leonidas Witherall was convinced that Martin Jones was innocent – and set out to prove it. Which was going to cause a lot of headaches for those police. It happens in Beginning with a Bash, a 1935 combination mystery and farce by Phoebe Atwood Taylor (writing as “Alice Tilton”) that introduced Leonidas Witherall to an unsuspecting world.
Phoebe Atwood Taylor wrote two dozen mysteries about a Cape Cod handyman named Asey Mayo, known (in the books, anyways) 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 seem to have committed a 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 way out.
If I’m making that all sound too simplistic, I apologize. These books are first and foremost what they were intended to be – books to cheer up a nation – a world, for that matter – staggering under the weight of a major financial depression followed by a deadly world war. So if the situations showed Leonidas Witherall manipulating police, chasing down unlikely criminals, and – by the end of the book – turning them over to a somewhat dazed police force, well they were successful in promoting a lot of laughter.
The series began in 1935 with Beginning with a Bash, and – in some ways – it’s not really typical of the whole series. Witherall, with his Shakespearean looks, is – I think – more realistic here than in later outings. Later books introduced standard series characters and standard story twists that are absent from this first book.
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 a 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. According to my handy-dandy inflation calculator, they would be worth more than 700 thousand dollars today;
- At least two competing street gangs, each trying to kill the other’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);
- A grand New England dowager type who not only enters into the general spirit of the mayhem, she happily goes way beyond it;
Believe me that’s all just the beginning of the plot. It’s wonderfully complex. Practically every chapter ends in a cliffhanger;
Let me add, for the politically correct, that this book – written in 1935 – has most of the prejudices of its time on display here. Stereotypes abound. Frankly, none of that was prevalent enough to bother me. It’s minor and almost irrelevant. Ignore it and read on.
If you’re looking for noir, for angst, for characters struggling with their own demons, for in-depth psychology, you’re in the wrong place this time. 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 Amazon’s booksellers do seem to have some relatively inexpensive paper copies available.
Oh – one more thing about Leonidas Witherall. In the mid-1940s, Witherall and other series characters were featured on a radio mystery show, NOT written by Phoebe Atwood Taylor, called The Adventures of Leonidas Witherall. Their pronunciation of “Leonidas” is the one I’ve been using for this podcast. And some of the episodes appear to be available on YouTube, just in case you’re curious.
You can listen to my original audio review by clicking here.
Next: The Lucky Stiff, by Craig Rice.
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