Cold Steal

Cold Steal is a mystery novel by the American writer Phoebe Atwood Taylor, published in 1939 under the name Alice Tilton. It is the third of the eight Leonidas Witherall mysteries.

Witherall is a retired teacher and a writer, known to the neighbours for his resemblance to Shakespeare, and he has inherited enough money to have a house built to his own specification while he was abroad. On the train to Dalton he shares a carriage with a shy woman everyone calls Swiss Chard and a young woman with a parcel and a secret, and he arrives to find that his new home is everything he planned, including a kitchen fitted out in red and a library with ladders. What he did not plan for is the dead neighbour in the garage, killed with a pickaxe, or the need to produce the next volume of his fictional detective Lieutenant Haseltine on schedule. He assembles a group of amateur assistants, among them a dotty housewife and a reformed car thief who has joined the police, and the investigation proceeds at the pace of their conversation.

Taylor set the series in a small Massachusetts town and wrote it in the same brisk comic register as her Asey Mayo books, with the detecting done by an amateur and a shifting cast of neighbours.