Showing results by author "Steven Thomas Oney" in All Categories

A Captain Waverly Underhill mystery.

Captain Underhill and Doctor Scofield recount their very first case.

April, 1961. It is tourist season on Cape Cod … and open season on the President. Having sent its favorite son to the White House, Cape Cod has come under the spell of Camelot. Young police deputy Waverly Underhill meets Doctor Scofield for the very first time, and together they seek to stop an assassination plot that anyone would call crazy.

Blind Salvation Army bell ringer, Rosie McGinty, suffers a grievous bodily assault and robbery of her kettle outside Brindle-Halls department store when she is struck from behind by what may have been a boomerang. A concerned Doctor Scofield pits his persistence against Captain Underhill’s initial reluctance in getting him to take up the case. Lacking any eyewitnesses, including the victim herself, Underhill devises a clever plan to entice the mugger, or muggers, into striking again.

For years an anonymous Cape Cod mural painter has been adorning the underpass to the Barnstable Village railroad bridge with images of scantily clad nudes in Classical poses. An activity which, although many in the Village enjoy them and approve, is also illegal and a source of irritation—particularly to nearby neighbor, Otis Narwhal, who feels the paintings go too far. With night-vision binoculars he sits on his porch at night, hoping to spy the Phantom Artist at work and report her to the local police.

A meteor explodes in the summertime sky over Cape Cod, and a man is struck dead by a flying fragment. A freak accident, it is supposed, until Captain Underhill and Doctor Scofield, checking into the science and history of meteors, as well as the laws of probability, are led to form a different conclusion. In 1935, James M. Cain wrote the classic insurance fraud mystery, Double Indemnity. Here’s a story that could be titled Triple Indemnity.

Dr. Alexander Scofield encounters his friend, retired police captain Waverly Underhill, at a Provincetown art opening. Then they both encounter a murder. The celebrity judge is stabbed in the back upstairs. Downstairs, there are seventy or eighty guests, one of whom must have done it.

Captain Underhill takes charge and quickly devises a simple but ingenious test that will force the killer to reveal himself.

A premonition of murder leading to violent death…voodoo, séances, automatic writing and psychic messages from the dead are all elements in a strange case that turns criminal. A worried Doctor Scofield calls in his friend, Captain Waverly Underhill, to unravel the mystery.

A literary flashback combining the creations of Charles Dickens (A Christmas Carol) and Erle Stanley Gardner, this courtroom melodrama poses the questions: What if Ebenezer Scrooge was murdered, found strangled in his bed with a bell cord knotted around his neck and a stake of holly driven through his heart? And what if the man charged with the crime was his own employee, Bob Cratchit?

Lottery winners Henry and Pamela McKnown have their luck stolen from them when their four-year-old daughter, Heidi, is kidnapped. Years pass without a word and the McKnowns, coping with their grief, are slowly rebuilding their lives. Then the cycle of terror begins again, as a carnival psychic shows up on Cape Cod, claiming to have made contact with the spirit of the dead child. Though Heidi’s voice comes through in a séance, Underhill is convinced it’s a fake.

One day after their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, the Beatles secretly slip off to Cape Cod. Seeking shelter from a freakish mid-February thunderstorm at an old village store, the Fab Four discover themselves pursued by a sinister character, menaced by the town bully and now, alarmingly, disappearing one by one. Manager, Brian Epstein, and bodyguard, Mal Evans, panic. Fortunately, Captain Underhill and Dr. Scofield are on hand.

Lady Kemp is worried. Her granddaughter, Carmeline, is about to marry Victor Fabloose, a French playboy who may be a gold-digger ... or a poisoner.

Captain Waverly Underhill is offered $25,000 to make sure the marriage never takes place. To succeed, he devises a clever scheme involving real buried treasure—a solid-gold statue of a pirate as big as a chocolate Easter bunny.

Listeners are transported back to St. James Hall, Piccadilly, first to eavesdrop backstage on a heated discussion between George Dolby, Dickens’ road manager, and his physician, Dr. Beard, about whether the Chief should be allowed to go on stage to perform yet again another strenuous reading of his murder scene, which although popular, is now poising a grave risk to the Chief’s own health. For Dickens, these performances have become something of an obsession.