The Daughter of Anderson Crow by George Barr McCutcheon

Description

George Barr McCutcheon made his name with Brewster’s Millions, the comic novel of a young man obliged to spend a fortune, and The Daughter of Anderson Crow works the same rich vein: a humorist’s delighted inspection of American small-town vanity. Its hero is Anderson Crow, marshal of Tinkletown, a village that considers itself “a perpetual monument to the American Revolution” and its policeman a living monument to himself. Crow is imposing, even in his pensiveness; he is also, by any objective measure, a public danger — and McCutcheon narrates his investigations with perfect deadpan affection.

Into this climate of self-congratulation comes the small town’s great event: a crime, a stranger, and — rising above the manure of provincial confusion — the marshal’s daughter, whose clear eyes and common sense quietly run circles around the entire male establishment. The mystery unfolds through courthouse scenes, church suppers, whispered theories, and the magnificent pomp of Crow’s own reasoning, in one of the best-comic criminal investigations ever set to paper before the detectives themselves got funny.

McCutcheon’s comedy is warm, never cruel. He loves his people precisely because he sees through them, and the final resolution rewards both the reader’s patience and the daughter’s enterprise. Published in 1907, the novel remains a pure delight of its kind — a small-town mystery in which nothing is sinister and everything is ridiculous.

Why readers pick it up

• Anderson Crow, one of the great comic detectives of American fiction.
• Deadpan small-town humor from the author of Brewster’s Millions.
• A mystery that the whole family can enjoy — and does.

About this DodaBooks edition

This edition brings you the complete text with clean professional typesetting, a working table of contents, and chapter navigation optimized for phone, tablet, and e-reader.