Asey Mayo is the definitive Cape Codder- a jack-of-all-trades, his age is a mystery, and his accent is so thick no outsider can understand him. These stories are a great introduction to the sleuth of the people, the Cape Cod Sherlock Holmes. Asey stumbles across several strange situations, gets tangled up in a few murders, and manages to solve the unsolvable puzzles that stump the general population of the one horse towns of 1930's Cape Cod. The local color in this book is great! Feels almost as though you're strolling down the Main Street of Wellfleet or Orleans; or racing around on the dirt back roads of Eastham during a thunderstorm, chasing the bad guys... Don't miss out on a tasty slice of American culture!

The first book in the series. It was actually written much earlier than the rest of them, and before her more famous Asey Mayo became a success. She resurrected the character, writing under a pseudonym, in order to make some more money during the war years. This is the only book in which Witherall himself isn't suspected of a murder. The other old standbys (Haseltine, the Octopus of Fate, Cannae) do not make their appearance. Therefore it's not my favorite book in the series, but it is an excellent introduction.

It's the middle of winter, and Witherall is working as a janitor in a bookstore, his pension from the boys' academy where he taught having disappeared during the stock market crash. A young man, out on bail after being framed for a crime he didn't commit, wearing only a thin suit and carrying a bag of golf-clubs (Taylor originated the MacGuffin long before Hitchcock!) enters the shop to evade a cop who's intent on returning him to jail. Within a few minutes, one of the people in the shop is bashed on the back of the head and killed. Coincidentally (yes, coincidences abound in the Witherall books) it's the same person who framed our young hero.

Witherall, confident in his ability to solve the crime, takes the young female owner of the shop and the young man in tow, and proceeds to deal with gangsters, oafish policemen, and fiendish professors of anthropology in short order.

He looks like a famous playwrite of long ago, thus his nickname of Bill. He solves murders, so he won't be arrested himself, and he has help from a very odd assortment of characters. When all else fails he thinks of "Cannae" (where the Romans were torn to "shreds" by the army of Hannibal) and everything comes out alright. It's funny, it's witty and you find you wouldn't mind finding a body in your own garage done in with a pickaxe if only you had half the fun the people in this book do.

If you loved the 'screwball comedies' of the Golden Age of movies, and/or the cliff-hanger endings of the weekly serials from about that same era, you should truly appreciate the Leonidas Witherall books by Phoebe Atwood Taylor, written under the pen name of Alice Tilton.

This particular story whizzes by so rapidly, you'll find yourself struggling to catch your breath from the hustle-bustle, while laughing uproariously at the same time. The truly amazing part of it (at least to me) is that there are 218 pages in this book, and all the action takes place in less than 24 hours! Amazing!

Leonidas is a William Shakespeare look-alike, and indeed, is frequently known as 'Bill Shakespeare'. His business persona is that of proprietor/headmaster at Meredith Academy, a prestigious boys school in Dalton, Mass., a suburb of Boston. The time is in the early 40s while the war is still being waged in both the east and the west. When Leonidas is not engaged in school activities, he is the author of the famous Lieutenant Haseltine adventure novels, written as Murgatroyd Jones. What with his own adventures, plus researching those of the good lieutenant, it's probably safe to say that, apparently, he knows every policeman in the state of Massachusetts, and a good many other states, as well.

When a huge deep-freeze is delivered to his home, Leonidas is determined that it is in error, and thus sets in motion the Harold Lloyd/Buster Keaton/Keystone Kops type non-stop action. As the freeze makes its way from house to house to school, he is visited by a lovely young blonde with violet eyes, the very personification of every man's birthday wish. Of course, it isn't his birthday, but the beautiful young lady in the gorgeous white gown and a corsage of violet-colored orchids is nonetheless positive she's at the right house.

In the meantime, the next door neighbors are moving, and the new family seems rather intrusive. And then there's Ernest Finger, or is he really Carlos Santos, and why does it appear that he's on everyone's 'most hated' list?

Leonidas and Terry (the blonde whose real name is Terpsichore!), his housekeeper Mrs. Mullet, and a cast of assorted folks as quirky and interesting as anyone could wish for, combine to make this one sensible, if breath-taking reading experience. I could barely stand to put it down, even though other duties beckoned. What fun! M'yes, indeed. If you've not previously made the acquaintance of Leonidas, I urge you to do so. The sooner the better!

It's Asey at his best, solving the mystery of the death of a person who deserved it, at a light house BandB on Cape Cod. It's fun and romance (not for Asey of course) and you love the group of interesting characters around for the fun.

...I didn't particularly like or dislike this book. It was written in 1931 which provides some charm. Oh the thrill of a real electric ice box rather than having to meet the train for blocks of ice. Mayo was literally hard for me to understand - his accent is incredibly thick. Also, the narrator is a different person so we don't get much of a sense of what makes Mayo tick.

Bottom-line: Might be worth going out of your way to find if you are either 1)a big fan of early mysteries or 2) a fan of Cape Cod. Otherwise, an ok read if it drops in you lap.

This would have been an excellent introduction to Asey Mayo if it had been the first of the series that I'd read. I enjoyed it tremendously, despite the fact that it was not so coherent as many of Ms Taylor's later works. She did an excellent job of bringing the Cape to life, and had a gift for accent and speech patterns. Sadly, there is a bit of bias in her books, which may reflect the times. Certainly her war-time books give a nice historical flavor that I've not seen with many light mystery authors.