Beginning with a Bash

Phoebe Atwood Taylor, best known for her Cape Cod mysteries with Asey Mayo as the detective, also wrote the Leonidas Witherall series as Alice Tilton. Like Asey Mayo, these are humorous detective stories. Witherall is a very different detective a retired high school English teacher with a striking resemblance to William Shakespeare (and therefore known to friends as Bill Shakespeare). In this first book it is 1937, Wiherall retired from teaching and went on a world tour --he came back to find his retirement savings were gone, and took a job as janitor at a bookstore. The story begins wen a young man (one of his former students) happens to take refuge in the bookstore, and tells Witherall and the young woman who just inherited the store show more (who happens to be a friend of his) that he was fired from his anthropology job when falsely accused of stealing $40,000 (even though he was cleared of the theft) by an unpleasant professor who happens to show up at the store looking for an odd volume of sermons and is then bashed on the head. The young man is naturally arrested for the crime, and Witherall and the young woman undertake to clear him , aided by a improbably friendly gangster and his girlfriend, who was the professor's maid. THey et off in search of the obscure book the professor was looking for, which appears to be connected to te $40,000., show less