Phoebe Atwood Taylor (1909–1976) was born in Boston and used her extensive knowledge of the area and its residents to add realistic local color to her books. She began publishing in 1931 with the first mystery featuring Asey Mayo, a Cape Cod native and jack of all trades. Mayo was the main character in 24 volumes published between 1931 and 1951. She wrote other books under the names Freeman Dana and Alice Tilton. The Tilton books featured Leonidas Witherall, a teacher and secret author of pulp fiction. For more about Taylor see Otto Penzler’s article on CrimeReads: https://crimereads.com/phoebe-atwood-taylor-cape-cod/
In the second book of the Asey Mayo series, Death Lights a Candle (Bobbs Merrill, 1932), Prudence Whitby, proper middle-aged Boston lady, accompanies her friend Rowena Fible on an early spring trip to Cape Cod. Once there, the duo is asked to play chaperone for a neighbor’s niece unexpectedly arrived from France. The neighbor, wealthy businessman Adelbert Stires, is hosting several men with whom he does business and he feels it would be improper to allow the niece to stay alone in the house with so many men. Sensitive to the proprieties, both Prudence and Rowena scoop up their still-packed bags and decamp to the Stires mansion.
The guests were already settled in the house but the host had yet to arrive. While they waited a late winter blizzard blew up. The electricity went out and much later Stires arrived, having walked a good bit of the way in the raging storm. The next morning Stires was dead. The local doctor and Asey Mayo, recently elected town sheriff, decided he was poisoned by arsenic. The roads are blocked so Mayo begins an investigation pending arrival of the state police.
Stires was known to be a sharp businessman and some of his guests did not feel especially amiable toward him. Mayo managed to collect evidence implicating almost everyone in the house to some extent but how the poison was administered was difficult to determine. The delivery mechanism is among the most unusual I have ever seen, worthy of Christie, who loved esoteric poisons.
I have been intrigued by the number of books from this time with spiritualism worked into the story line somewhere. Here the butler and his wife the cook are confirmed believers and try to convince Mayo to accept the help of a medium they know. An article from the History website says that spiritualism became more prominent in the UK and the US after the losses of World War I followed immediately by even more deaths during the flu epidemic, fading out as World War II began. These events are the common bookends cited for the Golden Age of Detection, so it’s no wonder the subject comes up in fiction written during the 1920s and 1930s. https://www.history.com/news/flu-pandemic-wwi-ouija-boards-spiritualism
Mayo is a refreshing change from the urban dilettante as amateur detective common at the time. His no-nonsense approach is practical and relatable, although the attempts to reproduce the Down East dialect can be hard to follow. I can understand his popularity with contemporary mystery readers. The detection phase here seemed to be unnecessarily long but that seems to be a minor quibble in the overall scheme of things. This is the only book I have read in the series, how Taylor’s style and plotting approach change over the next 20 years would be interesting to assess.