Phoebe Atwood Taylor •
The Cape Cod Mystery •

Prudence Whitsby and her niece Betsey, summering on Cape Cod, turn a deaf ear to the pleas of would-be house guests hoping to escape a heat wave. Instead they send “unrefusable telegrams” inviting two friends whose company they will actually enjoy: social worker Dot Cram, who “burbles with adjectives,” and clergyman’s widow Emma Manton, all 225 pounds of her.

A happy house party ensues with no concerns more serious than the usual beach occupations of treating sunburn and scrounging lemons for iced tea. One afternoon their novelist neighbor drops by to borrow a tool and leaves saying jauntily, “I depart to ham with the hammer.”

That same evening Snoodles—sorry, Prudence—stumbles across his dead body, with an empty sardine tin nearby. “And men do not die and then tuck a blanket over themselves. Dale Sanborn had been murdered.”

The Cape Cod Mystery is the first in a lengthy series featuring Asey Mayo—not a seafood condiment, but a local handyman who uses brisk common sense, bold tactics, and waterproof logic to unravel puzzles. After fixing a car that two other mechanics have given up on, he reports, “Wan’t nothin’ much the matter ’cept the whangdoodle on the thingumbob wa’n’t touchin’ the whatchamacallit.” Don’t be fooled by the aw-shucks vernacular: Mayo bears more resemblance to Holmes than to Watson (“that dumb feller Sherlock Holmes was always totin’ around”). One of his more famous pronouncements is “They ain’t many whys without becauses.”

Taylor didn’t enjoy the same degree of commercial success as her more famous contemporaries, but that only makes her work ripe for rediscovery. Treat yourself to an Asey Mayo mystery and see why a New York Times literary critic declared, “Phoebe Atwood Taylor can get more fun into a detective story than any writer.”