Beginning With a Bash

Rating:
Summary: The first Leonidas Witherall mystery
Review: 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.