Scattergood Baines, Detective

The Toe-Twiddlig Sage of Coldriver Solves 12 Baffling Rural Crimes

MYSTERY FANS WILL FALL IN LOVE WITH SCATTERGOOD BAINES!

Critics Rave about the Scattergood Baines Mystery Stories:
“Baines is an American institution … the most humorous and fascinating of rustic wits. A man who—in his life and daily acts—personified the shrewd downeasterner, guardian and solver of his neighbors’ problems. And when Baines turns detective, our delight knows no bounds.” —Leslie Charteris in The Saint Mystery Magazine

“That typically American character, that magazine and movie favorite—Scattergood Baines—had his own manhunting method. ‘I dunno’s I hold much with clues, not the kind ye kin see with your eyes and tetch with your fingers.’ He could ‘git the true inwardness’ of an assault-and-robbery—and that’s true detecting. Scattergood Baines acts the part of an authentic detective, in the purest American style.” —Ellery Queen in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine

“The set-up: Deeds of justice tempered by mercy. Scattergood runs the town from his hardware store. He rises early, eats a ‘light breakfast of flannel cakes, baked beans, salt pork and two kinds of pie—not to mention porridge and hot biscuits and coffee.’ When one of his farmer neighbors is robbed, he figures out who did it by thinking over the characters in the county with dispositions suited to the manner of the crime.” —New York Times

The Scattergood Baines Method:
“He leaned back on the specially reinforced chair on the piazza of his hardware store, removed his shoes and socks and began to twiddle his toes—much to the chagrin of his wife Mandy. His mind worked more freely when his toes were unconfined, so that he might wriggle them as he reasoned.”

Here are 12 classic mysteries featuring the three-hundred-pound Sage of Coldriver. Match wits with Scattergood as he unravels bank robbery, fraud, impersonation, forgery, smuggling, and many other criminal activities, including murder. Written during the Golden Age of the Detective Story, and printed in the same magazines as Rex Stout, Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner, most of the Scattergood Baines tales have never been reprinted before. For readers of Wolfe, Marple, and Father Brown, this one-of-a-kind collection, selected from the pages of The Saturday Evening Post and The American Magazine, is an incomparable treat.

Follow this most famous detective as he wiggles his toes through such puzzlers as:

The Missing Organ Fund
Scattergood Becomes a Private Detective
Scattergood Sums up the Evidence
Scattergood Causes a Snake to Bite
Scattergood Takes to His Bed
The Touchstone
A Piece of String
Scattergood Discovers Society
Dancing Daughter
Angel in the Woods
Leopards Don’t Change Spots
Scattergood Pulls the Strings
Scattergood and the Bearded Brothers

Leslie Charteris hailed Clarence Budington Kelland as “one of the Old Masters.” Few other authors could fit romance, mystery and detection into 5000 words with such adroit effortlessness.

Clarence Budington Kelland was author of nearly 100 novels of mystery and romantic suspense, had enough careers for several men: attorney, reporter, manufacturer of clothespins, director of a major newspaper group, and more. Kelland became best known as a fiction writer, penning some 100 novels, and selling them as serials to the biggest and highest paying magazines of the time—like the Saturday Evening Post, The American Magazine, Colliers, and Cosmopolitan. Many were immortalized on film, of which the romantic suspense comedy and Oscar-winner, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, is undoubtedly the most famous. Kelland appeared alongside Agatha Christie, Rex Stout and Erle Stanley Gardner in the same magazines, but was the most popular of the four. The New York Times described Kelland’s novels as “lively stories, designed to prick the jaded palate, that keep readers pleasantly entertained” and noted that “Kelland demonstrates the emotions of his lovers with a psychological penetration.” Kirkus Reviews called his novels “Bright and breezy, with plus appeal for murder-mystery addicts.” His magazine publishers kept besieging him for more novels because every time they serialized one of them (typically in 6-8 installments), circulation shot upward. Kelland obliged, and produced far more each year than his publisher (Harper and Row) could keep up with, leaving more than three dozen unpublished in book form when he died. His inimitable characters, trademark dialogue and deftly plotted stories, according to Harper, “made him an American tradition and won him more loyal, devoted readers than almost any other living author.” Kelland, as ever self-depreciating, simply described himself as “the best second-rate writer in the world.” His legions of fans, old and new, would likely disagree. There was nothing second-rate about his work.