The Monument

by Nathaniel Benchley

This is one of Benchley's New England small-town scandals combined with quiet murder in which a humorous device is ultimately, logically worked out. To be sure he has a psychotic killer named Pinhead as his wild card, but his closest attention is given to the everyday details of a local newspaper, a garden club, a town selectmen 's committee meeting, etc. Some barflies in the coastal village of Hawley decide that one of their old cronies, who died in Korea, deserves a monument. This fellow, it is revealed, was a total social incompetent who Joined the army to escape a Jail sentence and the monument thus becomes a fanciful idiocy. An opportunistic ultrareactionary named Sutter uses the monument as his main campaign plan and ultimately resorts to poison pen pranks and scandalmongering. The story's one murder is inessential to the plot but lends a certain menace.... Though Benchley's characters. aren't memorable, they are for the most part attractively sensible people who are given to the unexpected but right responses to involvements. This accounts in part for Benchley's established appeal.

249 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

Born in Newton, Massachusetts to a literary family, he was the son of Gertrude Darling and Robert Benchley (1889-1945), the noted American writer, humorist, critic, actor, and one of the founders of the Algonquin Round Table in New York City.

Nathaniel Benchley was the highly-respected author of many children's/juvenile books that provided learning for the youthful readers with stories of various animals or through the book's historical settings. Benchley dealt with diverse locales and topics such as "Bright Candles", which recounts the experiences of a 16-year-old Danish boy during the German occupation of his country in World War II; and "Small Wolf", a story about a Native American boy who meets white men on the island of Manhattan and learns that their ideas about land are different from those of his own peoples'.

Film director/producer, Norman Jewison made Benchley's 1961 novel The Off-Islanders into a motion picture titled The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming for which he received the nomination for an Academy Award for Writing Adapted Screenplay. He was a close friend of actor Humphrey Bogart and wrote his biography in 1975.

Benchley's novel Welcome to Xanadu was made into the 1975 motion picture Sweet Hostage.

His elder son, Peter Benchley (1940-2006), was a writer best known for writing the novel Jaws and the screenplay of the 1975 Steven Spielberg film made from it. His younger son, Nat Benchley, is a writer and actor who has portrayed his grandfather, Robert Benchley, in a one-man, semi-biographical stage show, "Benchley Despite Himself". The show was a compilation of Robert Benchley's best monologues, short films, radio rantings and pithy pieces as recalled, edited, and acted by his grandson Nat, and combined with family reminiscences and friends' perspectives."

Nathaniel Benchley died in 1981 in Boston, Massachusetts and was interred in the family plot at Prospect Hill Cemetery in Nantucket.