The Iron Clew

The Iron Clew is a mystery novel by the American writer Phoebe Atwood Taylor, published in 1947 under the name Alice Tilton. It is the eighth and last of the Leonidas Witherall mysteries.

Witherall, the Shakespeare lookalike who writes detective fiction and keeps being involved in real crimes, is working on a new Lieutenant Hazeltine novel when his housekeeper interrupts him and a brown paper parcel of bank documents disappears. He is due at a dinner at the house of the banker Fenwick Balderston in his capacity as a bank director, and instead of the dinner he finds his host clubbed to death with a bronze bust of the playwright he resembles. Assisted by a housewife named Liz Copley and a shifting gang of helpers, he works through the town of Dalton and the surrounding country until the bank papers, a missing dinosaur footprint and a copy of a rare book have all been accounted for. Taylor's series is built on the pleasure of a small town in which everyone knows everyone and several people are quietly competent at meddling.

This was the last book in the sequence, written twelve years after the first, and by then Taylor had also published more than twenty novels in her other series about Asey Mayo.