Phoebe Atwood TaylorCritiques
Auteur de The Cape Cod Mystery
Critiques
The Cape Cod mystery par Phoebe Atwood Taylor
Leading up to this celebratory week, there have been strange happenings — stolen keys, gun shots, fires and murder. Asey’s reputation for crime solving is the only solution.
Mayhew thinks someone is out to kill him and possibly the other two selectmen of the town. Asey is given a visitors’ badge, police badge and state police badge and the authority to back them up. Mayhew just doesn’t want the police to be involved. This seems a bit strange, but Asey reserves the right to bring the police in, if there comes a need.
Asey feel there is more below the surface that is going on and starts finding threads that do lead to more. Such as a corpse found in Hell Hollow, for a starter, that needs to be kept hushed up until after the week-long celebration. Then there is blackmail, embezzling and more! Asey really has his hands full in this case!
Suspects are aplenty at the tavern. Mark Adams, nephew of Kay Adams who is called by Mark to come to the tavern. A request that paused her planned winter in Capri. Ann Bradford, Eve Prence’s step-sister and hopes-to-be wife of Mark Adams. Tony Deen, a play-write and his blind son, Noris, who writes poetry. Alex Stout, a writer of banned books and the ex-husband of Eve. Lila Talbot, children’s author and her young son Eric. All the guests had had Eve involved in their lives and not necessarily in a good way. Eve Prence was a person who had to be the center of it all.
Asey Mayo finds himself with not only too many suspects, but also some unusual weapons, a convenient suspect and some odd clues.
The characters, setting and plot lines are entertaining and not so simple. Elements that make Phoebe Atwood Taylor’s Asey Mayo series an enjoyable read.
Steve is a writer currently working on an autobiography of Rosalie Ray, the radio star. It’s not easy or enjoyable, but the money will be a big plus to their finances.
Things start happening when Miles takes a bus ride home instead of the train, from a day trip to Boston. He winds up stranded on the road when the driver claims the engine is dead and goes off to make a phone call. The driver never returns, but Miles is picked up by one of the locals.
When Miles gets home, he is greeted with the Damons being upset due to Rosalie has made an unannounced appearance with plans to spend a few days. Something Steve has no need of — a demanding diva under his roof. To make things worse, Rosalie is found dead in her bed the next morning.
Advice is given to get Asey Mayo involved before things get worse…which they do. Asey’s knowledge of the people and area and past life experiences make him the best man to be around.
Another book in the Asey Mayo series that was written in the 1930s. A fun cosy read with a cast of characters.
When strange people, wearing yellow handkerchiefs, show up; ransacked houses and attempted murders occur, both sides suspect each other. What really makes things serious is the murdered body of a famous tycoon.
A nice mystery that becomes serious to Asey Mayo upon the death of the tycoon.
Another enjoyable cozy with Asey Mayo as the lead character, set in the 1930s Cape Cod mystery series by Phoebe Atwood Taylor.
Things become even worse when the host is found dead. Arsenic poisoning is the diagnosis. How it was administered is a mystery.
Asey Mayo stops by to visit with Pru and finds he’s walked into a murder investigation. Having solved a number of cases, he is at home with the situation.
A large number of suspects and easy access to arsenic make for a difficult time of determining the murder. There is also the matter of how the arsenic was administered to the victim.
Asey’s past experience and curiosity find that it may not be a simple case of poisoning, but something more.
The Asey Mayo series was written in the 1930s and I find they are enjoyable reads.
'The Cape Cod Mystery' was a pleasant surprise. Published in 1931, it's an American Golden Age Mystery that couldn't be more different from its English Detective Club contemporaries. I read it because it was selected as a side-read by the GoodReads Appointment With Agatha group and I has no idea what to expect.
'The Cape Cod Mystery' launched a series of books featuring amateur sleuth Asey Mayo, a Cape Cod native who, after travelling the world as a Merchant Seaman, now works for the powerful Porter family. Asey is dragged into his first case when his millionaire boss is arrested for the murder of a well-known and much-detested novelist. Asey has one weekend to find the real killer and stop his boss from becoming so entangled with the legal system that even his great wealth might not be enough to set him free.
The book got off to an exhaustingly fast start with dialogue so brisk and brittle it made 'The Gilmore Girls' look slow and naturalistic. To me, everything sounded brash until I hooked into the taken-for-granted privilege of the characters and realised that their chatter was all performative - the 1930s equivalent of cool.
Surprisingly, the pace increased about a quarter of the way through, when I first met Asey Mayo. Wow, what a whirlwind he was. And what a wonderfully refreshing contrast he was to Poirot or Wimsy. And how quintessentially late 19th Century Yankee he was. A man of broad experience, slim education, high intelligence and low cunning. He comes across as all practicality and common sense and no pretensions at all but he uses his 'I'm just a plain-speaking Cape Cod fisherman using my common sense to muddle through' personal as a weapon to ambush, beguile, and bully his way to the truth.
Part of what makes the story work is that it is told not through the eyes of Asey Mayo but through the eyes of Miss Wtsby, a well-respected Bostonian woman of means in her fifties. She has all the education and social graces that Asey lacks. She's also connected to just about everyone of importance in the plot. She is calm, rational, open-minded and prone to gentle humour. She makes an excellent foil for the folksy man-of-the-people amateur detective.
It took me a while to work out the social status of Miss Witsby and her niece. This made me realise that when I read Sayers or Christie, I'm always aware of the social class that the people come from and that sets my expectations of them. With the Cape Code summer people, I found myself class-blind. It was like suddenly losing my sense of smell. I couldn't figure out the class Miss Witsby came from or where the young people fit in the social strata. I finally figured out they must be from money because, when the maid had the evening off and the women had a 'pick up supper' they helped themselves to food, ate and then stacked the plates and left them for the maid to clean. Who does that? Four people at table and they make no effort to clean up after themselves and they treat that as normal. Nothing says money like taking that kind of thing for granted.
Asey and Miss Witsby work at a frenetic pace to track down what turns out to be at least half a dozen people who had both the motive and opportunity to kill the deservedly detested novelist. The investigation was heavier on humour than method but they got the job done.
To me, it felt that the author was setting out to debunk more traditional murder mystery stories by showing that diligently following clues was much less helpful than being able to read people and know when and why they were lying.
The humour mostly worked, although it was occasionally a little heavy-handed, especially when the Sheriff was involved, but it was always entertaining.
By the end of the book, I was beginning to find Asey a little wearing - there's only so much folk-wisdom I can enjoy - then the author came up with an ending that was clever and touching (and a little improbable) which put Asey in a much better light.
This was a high-energy piece of entertainment that rollicked along with more pace than grace but which made me smile and kept me interested.
Phoebe Atwood Taylor was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Her parents were natives of Cape Cod and descended from Pilgrims. She graduated from Barnard College in New York City in 1930, and returned to Boston. She married a surgeon also named Taylor and lived in the Boston suburbs of Newton Highlands and Weston. The couple also had a summer home in Wellfleet on Cape Cod. Boston and Cape Cod served as the locales for many of her mystery novels.
She published under her own name as well as under the pen names Freeman Dana and Alice Tilton. Her first novel, The Cape Cod Mystery (1931), introduced Asey Mayo, the "Codfish Sherlock," a handyman and amateur sleuth who appeared in 24 novels. These novels were full of humor and the local culture of Cape Cod in the 1930s and 1940s.
Another series featured Leonidas Witherall, a teacher, and author of detective novels.
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MikeFinnFiction | 4 autres critiques | Jan 6, 2022 |
MikeFinnFiction | 4 autres critiques | Jan 6, 2022 | 
His trip home, via train, has a few hiccups. He watches a woman hide a suspicious package in a trash container. He is knocked unconscious and kidnapped. He meets a very verbose young man who seems to follow him to his home.
When Witherall arrives at his new home, he is surprised at the new abode. It is very different from his original concept from looks to amenities to the dead body of Miss Medora Winthrop, in his garage.
Rather than call the police in about the body, Cassie, Price, good friend and person who oversaw the construction of his new house, convinces Witherall to solve the mystery himself. The hardest part is keeping the body from being discovered by anyone else! It seems while the house was being built, it was quite an interesting thing and a number of keys had been given out so tours could be led through the construction.
Written in 1939, it is a fun, light read, yet there are quite a number of twists and connections to untangle.
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