The best screwball mysteries from the golden age of detection

Golden Age mystery aficionados know Phoebe Atwood Taylor’s humorous Cape Cod mysteries, but they may not be familiar with the even more hilarious—in my opinion, anyway—mysteries she wrote as Alice Tilton.

A friend lent me Tillton’s The Left Leg. As soon as I’d read its last page, I was on the hunt for the rest of them.

Beginning with a Bash is the first in Tilton’s series starring Leonidas Witherall, a boys’ school headmaster, radio detective story writer, and dead ringer for William Shakespeare.

These mysteries read more like capers, with Witherall ricocheting around Boston as he stumbles over corpses, eludes gangsters, dons disguises, and deals with impudent children and persistent dogs. Guaranteed to make you laugh out loud.

Constance and Gwenyth Little—sometimes listed under the portmanteau Conyth Little—wrote 21 screwball mysteries in the 1930s and 1940s, starting with The Grey Mist Murders.

I’m recommending their second book, The Black-Headed Pins, because I think it’s where the Little sisters really begin to show their storytelling chops. Constance Little generally thought up the plots and clues, and Gwenyth fleshed out the books, both of them reportedly writing in bed each morning.

The Littles’ mysteries aren’t a series, but they have several items in common. They feature smarty-pants heroines, snappy dialogue worthy of a Frank Capra movie, and romantic disaster—until it all turns out right. The Black-Headed Pins ticks all these boxes.

It takes place over Christmas and involves a moving corpse, a family curse, and a miserly hostess that makes Scrooge look positively benevolent.

If screwball detective fiction intrigues you, you must read Craig Rice. Why not start with Eight Faces of Three, the mystery introducing the wacky, rye-soaked team of Jake Justus, Helene Brand, and John Joseph Malone?

Justus is a good-looking press agent and the book’s moral center; Brand is a gorgeous heiress and non-stop partier; and Malone is a stumpy lawyer-slash-PI with good instincts and better luck. Imagine Philip Marlowe meets the Marx Brothers.

In Eight Faces of Three, a young woman awakes to find her aunt murdered, all the house’s clocks set to 3 am, and herself the prime suspect.

Craig Rice was the first mystery writer to grace the cover of Time magazine. Her private life was strewn with ex-husbands and empty booze bottles, and she died way too young at 49.

However, her literary legacy—one critic dubbed her the “Dorothy Parker of detective fiction”—will keep her alive in the hearts of screwball mystery lovers for a good long time.

Yes, that Gypsy Rose Lee. Lee not only wrote The G-String Murders, she followed it up the next year with Mother Finds a Body.

In The G-String Murders, Lee writes from the first person, telling a remarkably homey murder tale (although not as sanitized as Lady of Burlesque, the movie starring Barbara Stanwyck based on the novel).

The mystery here is okay as mysteries go, but for me the real draw is the non-stop wise-cracking and the almost domestic portrayal of burlesque life. In the novel, Lee and her boyfriend Biff trade comic observations and share cheap diner meals while they determine who killed two people with, you guessed it, g-strings.

Besides Nick and Nora, it’s not easy to find compelling sleuthing couples. Jane and Dagobert Brown are an exception. She Shall Have Murder introduces the duo.

Dagobert is a charming genius with an inability to settle down to a job, or, indeed, even a meaningful hobby for more than a few months. The novel is told from Jane’s point of view. She’s our Watson and is alternately frustrated and entranced by Dagobert. She’s also a crime novelist.

In She Shall Have Murder, Jane and Dagobert aren’t yet married. Dagobert is disentangling from his estranged wife, and Jane hasn’t yet established herself as a writer. With Dagobert’s encouragement, Jane drafts a mystery novel that takes place in the law office where she works. To their shock, the elderly client Jane has pegged as the book’s murder victim actually dies.

The coroner rules it an accidental death, but Dagobert is sure it was murder. As they sort through suspects and motives, Jane and Dagobert trade loving barbs and wind up in laugh-out-loud situations. These novels are hard to find but worth the search.