The Cut Direct

The Cut Direct is a mystery novel by the American writer Phoebe Atwood Taylor, published in 1938 under the name Alice Tilton. It is the second of the eight novels about Leonidas Witherall.

Witherall is the retired schoolmaster who looks like Shakespeare and who has a habit of finding himself at the centre of a murder in the town of Dalton, near Boston. In this book he is nearly killed by a car, rescued by Margie and her boyfriend Cuff, and then knocked down by a second car, which leaves him waking in the house of Bennington Brett, a former pupil, with the man dead in front of him. The group that forms around the case includes Brett's secretary, two neighbours and the housewife who owns the carving knife that did the killing, and her new maid turns out to be Margie. Taylor has them all chase around Dalton after clues and suspects, and the novel's pleasure is in the speed of the chatter and the number of coincidences the town will support.

The series was published under a pseudonym, and Taylor wrote it concurrently with the Asey Mayo books that had made her name in the 1930s.