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The Mystery of the Cape Cod Players

Page history last edited by Jon 14 years, 6 months ago

Taylor, Phoebe Atwood - The Mystery of the Cape Cod Players (1933)

 

Wealthy Boston widow goes to Cape Cod at bossy adopted son's behest to recuperate from bout of pneumonia and finds murder at her doorstep, involving a group of itinerant "players."  Since this is coastal, rural New England, after all, renowned for the last eighty years or so for one of the highest fictional murder rates in the United States, she really should have expected as much.  Fortunately, Asey Mayo is soon there too to straighten everything out for everyone. Genuine detection, along with a great deal of insistently spelled native dialect, which slows the reading down considerable, yup.  Mechanics of plot a bit on the tedious side at times (lots of who was where when questions) and not all the players are easy to distinguish, but there's some nice, gentle humor and local color.  Perhaps some more description would have balanced out the the long chunks of dialogue in native dialect.  Particularly enjoyable, however, are Asey's exchanges with his cousin Syl and the local crazy hermit who lives in a shack.  I gather Taylor's books got zanier and more frenetic later; this one is comparatively sober.  The patrician Boston widow as Watson seems a bit forced and unlikely, was this a holdover of the Rinehart tradition?

 

All in all, an enjoyable book, demonstrating how the detective novel could accommodate all sorts of fictional styles, in this case that of the American regional novel.  More Mayo, please.

 

More general thought: for an author who has managed to remain in print for the nearly sixty years since she stopped writing, Taylor seems a rather understudied author, though Jeffrey Marks, I see, has a chapter on her in his book Atomic Renaissance.  Perhaps the longtime overwhelming focus on the great American hardboiled tradition has obscured such writers as Taylor (I'm sure Jeff makes this argument), for most genre historians, if not genre readers.

 

Curt Evans

 

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