Six Degrees of Separation: From Sandwich to The Wheel Spins

The Six Degrees of Separation meme is hosted by Kate at booksaremyfavoriteandbest. The idea behind the meme is to start with a book and use common points between two books to end up with links to six books, forming a chain. The common points may be obvious, like a word in the title or a shared theme, or more personal. Every month Kate provides the title of a book as the starting point.

The starting book this month is Sandwich by Catherine Newman, which I have not read... but I do have a copy that I am planning to read. The story takes place during an annual family visit to Cape Cod.

1st degree:

My first link is to The Cape Cod Mystery, published in 1931 by Phoebe Atwood Taylor. It is the first book in the Asey Mayo series. In the middle of a sweltering hot summer on Cape Cod, a man's body is discovered in a cottage. A sheriff arrests Bill Porter for murder, based on circumstantial evidence. Bill asks his friend, Asey Mayo, to find out who really committed the crime. The author knew Cape Cod quite well, and her depiction of it in this book is humorous and entertaining.

2nd degree:

Death in the Off-Season is a much more recent mystery set on Nantucket, an island about 30 miles south of Cape Cod. Merry Folger is a new detective in the Nantucket police, working under her father. This novel is the first book in the Merry Folger Nantucket Mystery series and was first published in 1994. Later it was republished by Soho in 2016, with edits to bring the series up to modern times. That worked well for me, and I liked the characters and the setting.

3rd degree:

The previous book was a police procedural and that is a favorite subgenre for me. Diamond Solitaire by Peter Lovesey is also part of a police procedural series, this time set in London and featuring Peter Diamond. But as this third book in the series begins, the police detective is no longer in the police, and is working as a security guard at Harrods in London. This wonderful story takes the reader to New York and then to Japan as the protagonist goes in search of the identity of a young Japanese girl.

4th degree:

So now I move to a police procedural set in Japan, Under the Midnight Sun by Keigo Higashino. This book starts out as a police procedural, then turns into something else. Detective Sasagaki is investigating the death of a man in an empty building. He starts with the victim's family, a wife and a son about 10 years old, and his place of business, a pawnshop. The case is dropped for lack of evidence although Sasagaki continues to look for more information related to the crime. The middle section of the book follows the lives of people related to the victim in the years leading up to the death. As the story gets closer to the end, Detective Sasagaki comes back into the story and the crime is solved. This book was originally published in 1999, and the novel portrays life in Japan in the 1970s to the 1990s, with changing fads, various stages of education, office life, and characters at various economic levels.

5th degree:

Staying with Japan and police procedurals, I turn to Tokyo Express, Seichō Matsumoto's first novel, published in 1958. In this novel, two detectives in different cities in Japan investigate the same crime and collaborate, sharing their thoughts and discoveries. A man and a woman are found dead on a beach in Kashii, and the police assume that it is a double suicide. The alibis of their suspects depend on train schedules, so a good amount of time is spent on that aspect of the alleged crime. This is a good picture of Japan after World War II; it was first published in English translation as Points and Lines.

6th degree:

Picking up on the emphasis on trains in the last book, I am moving to The Wheel Spins by Ethel Lina White, which takes place primarily on a train. This book was filmed as The Lady Vanishes, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. A young woman, Iris, meets an older lady while traveling on a train in Europe. They have tea and talk for a while, and then, Iris takes a nap. When she awakens, Miss Froy, the older woman, has disappeared, and the other people in the same carriage deny that there ever was a Miss Froy in the  carriage. The Wheel Spins was published in 1936, and is an excellent picture of the tensions in Europe in the 1930s.

My Six Degrees took me from Cape Cod and other coastal areas in the US, on to the UK and Japan, and finally to an unnamed area in Europe prior to World War II.  If you did this month's Six Degrees, where did your chain take you?

The next Six Degrees will be on January 4th, 2025 and the starting book will be the 2024 Booker winner, Orbital by Samantha Harvey.

Six Degrees of Separation: From I Capture the Castle to The Six Iron Spiders

 

The Six Degrees of Separation meme is hosted by Kate at booksaremyfavoriteandbest. The idea behind the meme is to start with a book and use common points between two books to end up with links to six books, forming a chain. The common points may be obvious, like a word in the title or a shared theme, or more personal. Every month Kate provides the title of a book as the starting point.

The starting book this month is I Capture the Castle (1948) by Dodie Smith. I had never read this book and it is on my Classics list, so I decided to get a copy and read it right away. This book seems to be almost universally loved, but I was disappointed, although I didn't really have any expectations. Nevertheless, I am glad I read it.

From I Capture the Castle I move on to another book with Castle in the title, The Man in the High Castle (1962) by Philip K. Dick. This book is in the alternate history subgenre. Philip K. Dick creates a world in which the Axis countries won World War II and the United States has been split into three sections. The Western coast is under Japanese rule, the East coast is governed by the Germans, and in between is a neutral zone, sort of. The year is 1962 and the story starts out in the Japanese sector. 

Again linking via a word in the title, my next link is to The High Window (1942), by Raymond Chandler.

Chandler's novels feature the private investigator Philip Marlowe. In The High Window, Marlowe is called in by a wealthy widow, Elizabeth Bright Murdock, because a coin in her late husband's coin collection is missing. She thinks that her daughter-in-law took it, and she wants Marlowe to find it. You would think that she could ask her son about it, but apparently no one in this family talks to anyone else. The coin that is missing is a Brasher Doubloon, in mint condition and very valuable. This novel was not as good as the previous two books in the series, The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, but it is still an excellent book. Where this novel does live up to the earlier promise of the two previous ones is in the beauty of the writing. Cover art is by Tom Adams, who also illustrated the covers for many Agatha Christie paperbacks.

Using the word Window in the title, I next link to Bedrooms Have Windows (1949) by Erle Stanley Gardner. A.A. Fair is a pseudonym used by Erle Stanley Gardner for the Bertha Cool and Donald Lam series. They are private investigators. Flamboyant, fast-talking Bertha Cool is the boss; Donald Lam works for her. I have not read this book in the series. My copy has a lovely cover illustration by Darryl Greene. 

I have read another book by Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A.A. Fair. Gold Comes in Bricks (1940) is about the same private investigator team. This is the second book in the series and Bertha Cool is still trying to mold Donald Lam into the employee she wants him to be. At the beginning of the book, Donald is studying jujitsu with a master named Hashita. Bertha wants him to be able to protect himself. He is not a tall, handsome, beefy detective. He is short and lean, brains not brawn. Henry Ashbury happens upon the training session and contracts with Bertha to hire Donald to find out how his daughter, Alta, is spending her money. He is concerned that it might be gambling or payments to a blackmailer. He brings Donald into his home as a physical fitness trainer and potential business partner so that he can get to know his family. While following Alta, he also uncovers a scheme to sell gold mine shares which Ashbury's stepson is part of. A very complex plot. The cover of my edition has an illustration by Robert McGinnis, my favorite illustrator for novels of this period.

Using Gold in the previous title leads me to The Golden Spiders (1953) by Rex Stout. Rex Stout is my favorite author. I have read all of the Nero Wolfe titles multiple times. This is a good one, although not in my top ten list for his series. In this novel, Nero Wolfe uncharacteristically agrees to work with a young boy from his neighborhood on a potential case of possible kidnapping. Before long, Archie and Wolfe and his pack of freelance detectives are investigating a group of people taking advantage of poor immigrants who are seeking help in getting settled in this country.

Spiders in the previous title leads me to my last book in the chain, The Six Iron Spiders (1942), by Phoebe Atwood Taylor. This book is a later entry in the Asey Mayo series. Taylor wrote 22 Asey Mayo mysteries between 1931 and 1951. This one was published in 1942, set during World War II. Asey has a job in the Porter Motor Tank Plant but has returned to his home on Cape Cod for two days. I haven't read this book, although I did read the first book in the series, The Cape Cod Mystery. See Kate's review of this novel at Crossexaminingcrime.

My Six Degrees took me from the UK in the 1930s to various locations in the US. The Man in the High Castle covers from the West Coast to the East Coast and two characters take a road trip though the middle of the US. Most of Raymond Chandler's and Erle Stanley Gardner's books are set in California, on the West Coast. Nero Wolfe lives in New York City, and Asey Mayo lives in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, both on the eastern side of the US. Not only that, but all of the books, including the starting book, were published between 1940 and 1962.

Have you read any of these books? I am especially interested in any one who has opinions on Bedrooms Have Windows or The Six Iron Spiders, since I haven't read those yet, and I am motivated to do so soon.

If you are participating in the Six Degrees meme this month, where did your links take you? 

The next Six Degrees will be on November 4, 2023, and the starting book will be Western Lane by Chetna Maroo, a novella that is part of the read-along for Novellas in November 2023. 

The Cape Cod Mystery: Phoebe Atwood Taylor

The Cape Cod Mystery is the first book in the Asey Mayo Mystery series by Phoebe Atwood Taylor. The story begins with a strange situation. In the middle of a sweltering hot summer on Cape Cod, a man's body is discovered in a cottage. A sheriff arrests Bill Porter for murder, based on circumstantial evidence, but has no jail to put him in so first places him in a pillory (also known as the stocks), then moves him to an empty boxcar -- I kid you not -- for a weekend. I was having problems with suspension of belief from the beginning.

Bill asks his friend, Asey Mayo, to find out who really committed the crime. Asey is a man of contradictions. Obviously intelligent and full of common sense, he has worked for Bill's family for three generations. First as a carriage builder, then as auto mechanic and now he is Bill's handyman. His speech is almost unintelligible and I usually don't like dialog written in dialect.
Quoting from the book:

His speech would be impossible for a student of phonetics to record on paper. It resembled no other dialect in the world. Let it suffice to say that he never sound a final g or t. His r was the ah of New England. His a was so flat that as Betsey said, you couldn't get under it with a crowbar.

But it did not take long for me to get used to the vernacular and I began to find the hero, Asey Mayo, a very amusing fellow.  The story is told by a narrator, Prudence Whitsby, who is living in a  cottage on Cape Cod with her niece (Betsey) and a cook. Prudence and Asey work together to try to clear the accused man, Bill Porter, before the weekend is over, at which point he will be officially charged.

I found the story charming. By the time we are close to the end of this story, it appears that there are no suspects (other than the man who is accused) without alibis. Of course, appearances are deceiving. I was fooled and had no clue as to who the culprit was.

I did have some problems with this mystery. It is mostly told in conversations between Prudence and Asey, and that doesn't allow for a lot of depth of characterization. I had the basic characters who lived on Cape Cod down pretty well, but got confused trying to keep track of all the visitors who were also potential suspects.

I recently purchased an e-book, Atomic Renaissance: American Women Mystery Writers of the 1940s and 1950s, by Jeffrey Marks. This contains a section on Taylor and here are some excerpts:

At a time when many mystery authors had turned to the hardboiled genre, Phoebe Atwood Taylor followed her own comedic path. Under three different names, she wrote humorous regional mysteries set in New England. Although she began her career during the first Golden Age when humor was more prevalent, her wacky tales of intrigue allowed her to continue writing long after many cozy writers had fallen away. She gave up her career in 1951 after 33 books, but her works remain in print today.

Taylor was born on May 18, 1909 in Boston, surprisingly far from the peninsula she would call home for most of her life. Taylor later recalled that she was the first member of her family to be born off Cape Cod in over 300 years. Like many established New England clans, family mattered to the Taylors. She was an avid genealogist and knew her family's history back to the settlement of the Cape.

And later in the same chapter...

It was no surprise to anyone who knew her that Taylor's mystery took place on Cape Cod, a place she knew intimately and loved. Taylor prided herself on her knowledge of the Cape and its environs, details that she included in her novels.

Thus Taylor knew Cape Cod quite well, and her depiction of it in this book is humorous and entertaining. Generally I don't lean towards humorous mysteries, but this one was just right for me. There are 24 novels in the series, and I will try a few more. I have read that later ones are different from the earlier ones. Prudence only narrates the first two.

The author is profiled at Peggy Ann's Post.

Here are two reviews with more detail about the story than I have provided.
At Classic Mysteries, posted just yesterday!
At In Reference to Murder.