Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Beginning with a Bash! Tuesday Night Bloggers: Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Week 1

In April the Tuesday Night Club Bloggers look at American Golden Age mystery writer Phoebe Atwood Taylor (1909-1976), author, under her own name, of two dozen books (2 novels and 2 novella collections) about Cape Cod amateur sleuth Asey Mayo and, under the pen name Alice Tilton, of an 8 additional mysteries about Boston amateur sleuth Leonidas Witherall. (She also published one standalone mystery, Murder at the New York World's Fair, as Freeman Dana.)

Taylor is notable in the mystery genre both for contributing, with the Asey Mayo tales, to the "local color," or American regional, mystery and, with the Tilton books, to American screwball mystery--  though to be strictly accurate the Asey Mayo books got increasingly screwy as well as the series went along!

Let's just say that in both the Taylor and the Tilton series people tend to get "bashed" and "biffed" a lot.  Taylor's mysteries definitely call for headgear.

Here is an old review I did at my blog of Taylor's novel Banbury Bog.  Next week I will have  a fresh Taylor post.  And here's the new stuff from the rest of the Club:

World's Fair (The Corpse Steps Out, Jeffrey Marks)
The Hollow Chest (My Reader's Block, Bev Hankins)
The Cape Cod Mystery (Clothes in Books, Moira Redmond)
Punch with Care and the Battle of Pen Names (Cross Examining Crime, Kate Jackson)

2 comments:

  1. "Let's just say that in both the Taylor and the Tilton series people tend to get "bashed" and "biffed" a lot. Taylor's mysteries definitely call for headgear."

    Oh my, is that ever accurate! I love PAT's books, but I frequently develop these peculiar headaches as I'm reading them... ;-)

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