 Leonidas Witherall ("the man who looks like Shakespeare"), once an instructor at a private boys' school, has lost all of his money due to the Wall Street crash of 1929, and takes to anonymously writing books and, later, a radio show about the adventures of "Lieutenant Hazeltine" as a means of survival, while solving murders as a sideline.In the eight novels chronicling his adventures, Witherall is confronted with a corpse under unusual and maximally embarrassing circumstances that suggest his own guilt, requiring him to enlist a motley crew of assistants, use disguise and impersonation to escape discovery, and engage in at least one scavenger-hunt-like chase before solving the crime.Once in every novel, Witherall references the radio program's constant repetition of "Cannae"—an ancient battle from which Hazeltine draws inspiration so that his smaller force defeats his larger mass of enemies.