Dead Weight: (A Golden-Age Mystery Reprint)

Ed MacIntyre and Walt Tuttle, harried creators of the hit Chicago radio soap opera serial Home Town, all about the heartrending traumas endured by the good (and sometimes not so good) people of the fictional town of Stedham, have decided to quit the radio rat race and retire to Walt’s quiet little home town in Massachusetts. There they can enjoy the laid-back country life while managing, along with Ed’s wife Binnie, the local pharmacy, which comes complete with a spiffy soda fountain. What can go wrong? Lots, as it turns out! Not long after their arrival in Hamsted, Walt is discovered late at night shot dead in a booth at the pharmacy, a scrap of paper clutched in his hand and an overturned glass of strawberry soda spilling pink froth on the table before him. Who whacked Walt at the pharmacy? Could it have been someone from Walt’s and Ed’s old Chicago life, or was it someone with a local grudge? What does the town simpleton, the strawberry soda-guzzling Dodo Brown, know about the crime? And is he really as simple as he appears? Ed and Binnie find themselves trapped in a real-life mystery melodrama as strange as anything Ed and Walt ever concocted for Home Town–one that puts them in peril of their own lives!

A Jazz Age director of the Harvard University Band and the composer of Harvard’s Own March, Addison Simmons (1902-1972) wrote radio serials in the Thirties and Forties, working with, among others, the great Wyllis Cooper, creator of Lights Out and Quiet, Please.

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