Beginning with a Bash

Beginning With a Bash is a mystery novel by the American writer Phoebe Atwood Taylor, published in 1937 under the name Alice Tilton. It is the first of eight novels about Leonidas Witherall.

Martin Jones takes shelter in Peters's secondhand bookshop while he is being pursued for the theft of fifty thousand dollars from the Anthropology Society, a crime he says his former employer invented. There he meets Witherall, who taught him at Meredith Academy and who now works in the shop after losing everything in the stock market crash of 1929. The shop has a new owner who knows Jones, a book thief walks out with something valuable, a car crashes outside, and the company of them are drawn into working out what has actually happened. Taylor keeps the plot moving through a small cast and a great deal of talk, and Witherall, who is known for looking like Shakespeare, settles into the role of the amateur who reads a situation better than the police do.

Taylor wrote two long-running series, and this one was published under a pseudonym so that the new character would not be compared with her better known Asey Mayo novels.