The Cape Cod Mystery: An Asey Mayo Mystery (Asey Mayo Cape Cod Mysteries)

Asey Mayo is a jack-of-all-trades, who becomes an amateur sleuth after the arrest of his friend and boss, Bill Porter. The latter is arrested for the murder of the writer Dale Sanborn, whose history turns out to be different than was supposed while he was still among the living. The novel shows life at Cape Cod in the early 1930s from the viewpoint of Prudence Whitsby, an upper-class spinster who is a resident on the Cape. Interesting and fun, but don't expect Nobel Prize material.

Prudence Whitsby, the narrator of this 1931 book, has a cottage on Cape Cod that she shares with her niece Betsey, her cook Olga, and her cat Ginger. It's a hot summer week in the Northeast, and everyone wants to escape to a place with cool shore breezes. Prudence and Betsey invite their friends Emma and Dot for a visit, while author Dale Sanborn is renting an even tinier cabin on the property. But before you know it, Sanborn is found dead, having been struck down in his residence by the ubiquitous "blunt instrument." The local sheriff quickly decides that the prime suspect is Bill Porter, a member of the noted local automobile manufacturing family. Porter's household handyman and jack-of-all trades, Asey Mayo, sets out to clear his employer's name. He enlists Prudence's assistance. After all, she's clear-headed and an avid mystery reader who should be able to help puzzle out the situation. Asey is a man full of homespun sayings and attitudes. "They ain't many whys without becauses." "The suspected an' the guilty look a lot alike on the outside. They ain't got no glarin' dif'rences." And "Don't no animal attall set out to do anything that it don't leave some traces of it." True, all of it true. For not having known each other prior to this point, Asey and Prudence work well together. They figure out a timeline of events, track down and interview people of interest, and send telegrams off to acquire more information. Asey turns out to have connections everywhere, thanks to his storied past. And Prudence may be a spinster in her early 50s, but she's a savvy gal when it comes to conducting such a clandestine investigation. The duo has just one weekend in order to unearth the true criminal and save Bill Porter from prosecution. Will they succeed? We readers sure hope they do. I'll admit that I suspected the right person by the second half of the book. But that didn't make the plot any less compelling. Remember, folks: in this instance, the answer lies with the sardines. Entertaining reading for most mystery lovers, especially those with a fondness for the 1930s.

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.