Sandbar Sinister starts out on a positive note: the narrator, a Boston matron of over 50 who has lost everything in the last great bank crash of the late 20s, has been given a long, unpaid, summer vacation by her penny-pinching boss at the department store where she has had to take work. Things, she feels, are finally looking up, and the upward trend continues when her dear friend, Lizzie, invites her down to her brother’s house on Cape Cod. It sounds idyllic, even now: a large but charming beach house, the only house on this stretch of beach because the brother is a millionaire and bought the whole beach, staffed with a butler/valet and cook/maid, and just across a private bridge from the quaintest little town on Cape Cod, one known for the beauty and peace of it’s main street. Sun, sand, surf, boating, relaxation!
Little does “Pen” (Penelope) Colter realize that her dear friend, Lizzie, has also decided to take a vacation by leaving all the housekeeping to Pen. Pen is the one that the servants come to, when they need someone to phone in a grocery order, or make up a list of menus, or call the plumber. Pen is the one who, when Lizzie’s adult daughter and three assorted friends descend en masse unexpectedly, makes up the guest rooms. And again when Lizzie’s brother – whom Pen has never gotten along with – and his protege show up, again unexpectedly. Pen is the one that Lizzie’s daughter asks to make 3 dozen sandwiches for her early-morning fishing trip. And it is Pen who is woken up at 5 am to give directions to the home where the fishing party is picking up their guide for the day.
There will be no fishing that day. When Pen, accompanied by the daughter’s mystery-writing boyfriend, arrives on the picturesque main street of the quaint nearby town, it looks like the aftermath of an
Animal House party: fine citizens of this dry town are passed out in bushes and on benches all up and down main street. Cars have been parked in unusual places, wrapped around lamp posts and on sidewalks and lawns. Every plate glass window on the street has been shattered, and mannikins at the Lady’s Mercantile re-posed in unladylike ways. The place reeks of booze. Both front tires of Pen’s car are blown out by the broken glass on the ground; and the fishing guide is passed out under a bush with the town sheriff.
Prohibition has ended.
Luckily local fixit man, Asey Mayo, is there to save the day. He agrees to lead the fishing trip and accompanies Pen back to the sandbar where they quickly discover a dead body in the boathouse, a man in fake whiskers, who turns out to be the husband of Pen’s cousin, who disappeared after being blamed for the disappearance of a large number of bearer bonds by none other than… Lizzie’s millionaire brother! But where is the brother now? He isn’t anywhere to be found when Asey and Pen raise the house and call in the state police. A search party ensues and his body is eventually found casually buried in sand at the other end of the beach.
But who will investigate? The state police are tied up with bank robberies and assassination attempts elsewhere and don’t really know the local landscape. Luckily Asey has been deputized before in situations like this and has actually built up quite a reputation for himself as a Codfish Sherlock. But you mustn’t underestimate Asey – he may look like one of those men you find in fishing villages, with skin weathered by the sun and salt until you can’t tell how old they are, and blue eyes that always seem to be scanning the horizon, but Asey has depths. As a young man, he put to sea as a Nantucket sailor, and learned quite a bit about cooking, fighting, and human nature. Having grown up on The Cape, he knows all the backroads and gossip. He knows what approach to take to get each person to talk. And, a first class mechanic, he worked with Bill Porter to develop the first Porter car, establish the Porter manufacturing line, and is now on the board at Porter Motors – when dressed in his “town” clothes and speaking fine Bostonian, you almost wouldn’t recognize Asey. Nefarious folk underestimate Asey at their peril.
Asey is Phoebe Atwood Taylor’s greatest detective – the other being Leonidas Witherall, of whom I wrote earlier this year. Asey strings together clues, dragging his hapless Watson along with him, as things get crazier and crazier. Lizzie’s brother was also the famous Varney Cheyne, the reclusive mystery writer who no one has ever seen but has written a whole series of bestselling novels and earned millions? The mysterious bearded man was going around telling people that
he was Varney Cheyne, although he clearly wasn’t, and blackmailing the brother? One of the daughter’s friends turns out to have been stalking the millionaire brother, trying to determine on behalf of his publishers, who Varney Cheyne really was? The other friend once met the brother when her car broke down on a cold dark rainy road and she urgently needed to get to Boston to sit by her dying father’s bedside – and the brother refused her a ride, even to the nearest service station? And the brother was secretly married to the gooey blonde who typed his manuscripts, if only to keep her from revealing Varney Cheyne’s true identity, a woman who is now here, on the cape, camping – yes, camping! – in the woods nearby the sandbar?
Suspects and clues abound. Everyone had a motive to off poor Lizzie’s brother – but who would also want to kill the mysterious bearded man? And why?
Just when you think things can’t get any crazier, Asey sets his trap, so deftly that none of the other characters, the state policeman, Pen, the murderer,
or you realize that a trap is being set. And then the murderer steps into the trap and it shuts closed around them with a satisfying
snap!
This is one of my favorite Asey Mayo books, and is representative of Atwood Taylor’s work: a combination of summer folk (millionaires in big houses and townies camping in the woods or staying in bed and breakfasts or renting shacks) and the people who live on Cape Cod all year around; a tale that could only take place on Cape Cod, requiring ponds, beaches, moonlit pursuits by boat through ocean and bay, found ambergris, and small town life of a specific time and place; a crazy plot that builds through chaos to release; and the practical, down-to-earth solutions of Asey Mayo.
I think one reason that I like them so much is that the setting comes alive. I read once a master librarian – who then went on to be a mover-and-shaker at Goodreads – describe her method for recommending books. She asks you what you read last, and what you liked about it. Inevitably people described one of five things:
1
- The characters (hobbits, ents, elves)
- The world it took place in (from The Shire to Mordor, and the nostalgic remnants of Numerorean glory)
- The plot (all the twists and turns of Frodo’s journey, of Aragorn’s ascension to King)
- The writing (the poetry, his turn of phrase, his descriptors, for example when Frodo shows Bilbo the ring in Rivendell and then sees Bilbo turn, just for a moment, into something Gollum-like)
- The message (when evil rises, even the smallest of us must step forward and do what we can though the world is large and we may not know the way and we risk losing all that is precious to us, for evil will seek out all places and touch all those it comes in contact with and take from us all that we have fought to preserve)
I love books that create a strong sense of place: Tolkein makes middle earth a place that you just want to keep exploring, keep finding what is around every corner; Laura Ingalls Wilder makes the plains and her homes on them come alive; Heinlein makes life on space ships and other places real, and Mars, and Venus, seem like real places that you could visit. And Phoebe Atwood Taylor makes you every bump, dune, and weathered home in Cape Cod and love it as much as she clearly did.
Republished by Foul Play Press in the 1980s, Atwood-Taylor’s books were widely available for decades. Now they’re harder to find. But worth it if you can.
When life seems crazy, read a book with a screwball plot: you’ll feel better.
- I think her example used Harry Potter but I’m not an HP fan, so I’m using LOTR. ↩︎
