Dead Ernest

Dead Ernest is a novel published in 1944 by Phoebe Atwood Taylor writing as Alice Tilton, and the seventh of the eight Leonidas Witherall mysteries.

The opening is a sequence of intrusions. Witherall is writing the final words of the latest Lieutenant Hazeltine adventure when his housekeeper, Mrs Mullet, arrives to offer what the book calls her candied opinion; two men then deliver a deep freeze he did not order; and a woman in an evening gown and an orchid corsage arrives and serenades him by mistake. The deep freeze turns out to contain the body. The deep freeze is delivered by two men who were never asked to bring it, and the body inside is the first thing the book asks the reader to accept.

Taylor wrote two long-running amateur detective sequences under different names, and the Witherall books are the more farcical of the two, with the plotting built on coincidence and accumulating absurdity rather than on procedure. Witherall is a man who resembles Shakespeare, and the novels keep their violence inside a domestic setting of visitors, deliveries and mistaken arrivals.