Octagon House, by Phoebe Atwood Taylor (1937)

(McElroy House in San Francisco, 1861)

Phoebe Atwood Taylor, writing in the 1930s and 1940s, is the creator of the "hayseed" sleuth, or the "codfish Sherlock," Asey Mayo. Asey does most of his sleuthing on Cape Cod.

What is an Octagon House?

Octagon houses were a unique house style briefly popular in the 1850s in the United States and Canada. They are characterised by an octagonal (eight-sided) plan, and often feature a flat roof and a veranda all round. Their unusual shape and appearance, quite different from the ornate pitched-roof houses typical of the period, can generally be traced to the influence of one man, amateur architect and lifestyle pundit Orson Squire Fowler. Although there are other octagonal houses worldwide, the term octagon house usually refers specifically to octagonal houses built in North America during this period, and up to the turn of the century.

Octagon House was written in 1937 and is the 11th book in the series. The book has some interesting features. The first chapter starts out in the new WPA library - one of Franklin D. Roosevelt's ideas to help Americans out of the Depression was to create work - the Works Project Administration or WPA, and one of these was to paint murals in post offices across the land.

The lead character has spent all her life hunting for ambergris (a whale discharge that was much used in making perfumes and was extremely valuable). When she finally finds some..enough to make her fortune, it is so waterlogged that she can't lift it out of the surf. Along comes her hated sister, who agrees to help her...for a price.



Asey Mayo books
The Cape Cod Mystery - 1931
Death Lights a Candle - 1932
The Mystery of the Cape Cod Players - 1933
The Mystery of the Cape Cod Tavern - 1934
Sandbar Sinister - 1934
Deathblow Hill - 1935
The Tinkling Symbol - 1935
The Crimson Patch - 1936
Out of Order - 1936
Figure Away - 1937
Octagon House - 1937
The Annulet of Gilt - 1938
Banbury Bog - 1938
Spring Harrowing - 1939
The Criminal C.O.D. - 1940
The Deadly Sunshade - 1940
The Perennial Boarder - 1941
The Six Iron Spiders - 1942
Three Plots for Asey Mayo (novelets) - 1942
Going, Going, Gone - 1943
Proof of the Pudding - 1943
The Asey Mayo Trio (novelets) - 1946
Punch with Care - 1946
Diplomatic Corpse - 1951