by Phoebe Atwood Taylor (1931)
Our Hosts
The Victim
The Sleuth
The Suspects
The police
Interested parties
Cape Cod. The legendary Eastern United States summering place. Located at the southeast corner of Massachusetts, it’s a sixty-five mile length of land extending out into the ocean, curving upward in the shape of a hook, or a man flexing his arm. It is a mile wide at its thinnest point, and 20 miles wide at its thickest. The beautiful long, sandy beaches are what call summer visitors to it, and although the land is practically barren otherwise, the native Cape Codders make a living from the teeming waters surrounding them, and from the visitors who come every summer to fill the hotels and rent the cottages.
Miss Prudence Whitsby and her niece Betsy are two of these perennial Cape Cod visitors. This summer they acquired a cottage ‘that neither leaks or squeaks, two virtues which summer vacationists will recognize as paramount.’ In addition, they were ‘entranced by the truly spacious living room and its mammoth fire place…the view was the best in town, for the cottage was perched on the flat top of a sandy, bayberry-bush-covered hill from which we could see the greater part of Cape Cod Bay…there were no near neighbors…a hundred and fifty feet away was a converted..rough one room cabin.’
When the newspapers report that a heat wave has hit the Eastern cities, the two women invite a couple of their friends down for the weekend. Young and vivacious Dorothy Cram is a college friend of Betsy’s, while large, lovable and recently widowed Emma Manton is a life long friend of the elder Miss Whitsby.
One reason why the Whitsby’s enjoy their summer vacations so much is their long-time friendship with the wealthy Porter family. (The Whitsbys are not paupers themselves.) Bill Porter, the younger son, toils not, neither does he spin, but he’s known Betsy for twenty years, and is rather in love with her.
The only ‘leak and squeak’ to mar their perfect vacation is that someone has rented the cabin a little way away from their cottage, thus marring their privacy. It is the well known novelist, Dale Sanborn, who specializes in ‘exposes,’ in taking the characters and situations in his book from real life. His most famous book is something which the critics called the greatest expose of married life in America (Prudence Whitsby once tried to read it – she got through 40 pages before giving up, finding it rather nasty) and he has made a present to the Whitsby’s of an advance copy of his current novel, called Reverence.
Mr. Sanborn has rented that converted cabin for the rest of the season, but he doesn’t survive that long. In fact, he doesn’t survive on the Cape for more than two days. In that time, he’d managed to make a few enemies. He’d made a pass at Betsy, who spurned him. He’d run over Bill Porter’s valuable show dog, and left him to die in the road. And he’d broken off his engagement to Dorothy Cram, rather callously.
That’s not all. Two of the Whitsby’s other friends, a happily married couple until something to do with Sanborn had caused them to divorce, have shown up on the Cape. And Sanborn’s brother, who had good cause to hate him, is there as well…and who knows how many other people had read the papers that told them the famous novelist Dale Sanborn was summering in Cape Cod?
But it’s Bill Porter who is arrested by the police for the blunt-object murder of the despicable Sanborn, and it’s Porter handy man and general dogsbody Asey Mayo who decides to find out the truth.
Asey Mayo takes his place in the ranks of the colorful detectives of the Thirties. Prudence Whitsby describes him:
He usually walked with his shoulders hunched and his head thrust forward. As he moved his worn corduroy trousers and flannel shirt flopped as though anxious to catch up with the rest of his spare frame. N old broad-brimmed Stetson set at an angle on his head gave him a strangely rakish look. He almost invariably chewed tobacco, and that habit coupled with his trick of pronouncing no more syllables of a word than were absolutely necessary, made him quite intelligible to those who didn’t know him.
Although he called himself a mechanic, he had taken a turn at nearly every trade. As steward, cook or ordinary seaman he had sailed over the seven seas in every type of ship. He had made his first voyage on one of the last of the old clipper ships, and before he had settled down in the town he had been mate of a tramp steamer. Under Bill’s grandfather he had built carriages; under Bill’s father he had learned about automobiles. [The Porter fortune has come from the automobile industry.] I doubt if he had ever had more than a fleeting glimpse of the inside of a school-room, but his knowledge of the world and its inhabitants was vastly superior to that of the average man.
The town cast a critical eye upon him because he belonged to no church and rarely attended any service outside of the Christmas Eve celebration, when he went and lustily sang hyms. He was neither a Mason, a Bison or an Elk.’
As for his manner of speech, Prudence elaborates: ‘…he never sounded a final g or t. His r was the ah of New England. His a was so flat that…you couldn’t get under it with a crowbar.’
Miss ‘Prudence ‘Snoodles’ Whitsby
Betsy – her niece
Olga – their cook
Dale Sanborn
Asey Mayo
John Kurth - once happily wed, now, thanks to Sanborn...
Maida Waring - once happily wed, now, thanks to Sanborn...
Dorothy ‘Dot’ Cram - not yet happily wed...or would it have been happy?
Emma Manton – widow of Reverend Henry Edward Manton
Bill Porter - he wants to marry Betsy, and Sanborn had his eye on her too...
Hunter – the state cop
Slough Sullivan – sheriff. Also the local shopkeeper.
Michael Sullivan – his son. Not very handy with a camera.
Dr. Reynolds
Asey Mayo and Prudence Whitsby team up to solve the murder. They make an engaging team and Asey Mayo makes an engaging detective. He reveals himself to be extremely well, if self, educated, and extremely intelligent as well. This is an excellent debut novel for the ‘Hayseed Sleuth,’ or ‘The Codfish Sherlock,’ as he comes to be known later in the series. The life of 1930s Cape Cod comes vividly to life as well.
‘’Asey was the kind of man everybody expects to find on Cape Cod and never does. He was by my reckoning about sixty years old, because I am fifty, and I knew he had been ‘voting age’ as they say in the town, when I was a girl visiting my relatives. No one seeing him for the first time could tell whether he was thirty-five or seventy. His long lean face was so tanned from exposure that the lines and wrinkles did not show. His mouth was wide, with a humorous twist about the corners, and his deep-set blue eyes twinkled disconcertingly.
This review copyright
May 24, 2000.
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Phoebe Atwood Taylor's Asey Mayo and Leonidas Witherall novels are available from used bookstores. Check out: www.abe.com.
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