John Rhode

• Born: 1884
• Birthplace: Unknown
• Died: December 8, 1964
• Place of death: Eastbourne, Sussex, England

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; private investigator; thriller

Principal Series: Lancelot Priestley, 1925-1961; Desmond Merrion and Henry Arnold, 1930-1960

Contribution

The detective novels written by Cecil John Charles Street under the pseudonym John Rhode are books of detective reasoning almost to the exclusion of action. The murder has usually been committed before the book begins. Dr. Lancelot Priestley solves the crime by deductive logic on the basis of information brought to him by his friends at Scotland Yard. He frequently gives Scotland Yard hints that open the appropriate lines of investigation. In his day, Rhode was often cited as one of the leading figures of British detective fiction, but he has not retained his popularity from the Golden Age quite so well as some of the others. His greatest achievement is in meticulously observing the rules of fair play even in the most complex situations involving arcane knowledge.

The books that Street wrote under the name Miles Burton are in general regarded as weaker than those he wrote as Rhode. Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor suggest, however, that the Burton books “tend to be wittier and less dependent on mechanical devices, as well as more concerned with scenery and character. They are often less solid, too, the outcome being sometimes pulled out of a hat rather than demonstrated.” Another difference is that Merrion and Arnold operate in the country, while Priestley is an urbane Londoner.

Biography

John Rhode, born as Cecil John Charles Street and also known as John Street, was extremely reticent about his private life. He refused to be listed in Who’s Who, and many reference works do not give the exact date of his birth or death (several are in error about the year of his death). An indication of how secretive a person Street was and how carefully he separated his various personalities is the fact that he used the title Up the Garden Path for both a Burton book published in 1941 and a Rhode book published in 1949. He even invented a fictitious year of birth for Burton, whose books he never admitted were his. He is said to have been a career officer, a major, in the British army and a field officer in both World War I and World War II. Awarded the Order of the British Empire, he also received a Military Cross, a fairly high distinction. Street’s firsthand experience of war may perhaps even be credited with directing him to literary pursuits because his first few books were studies of gunnery and a war novel (The Worldly Hope, 1917) published under the pseudonym F.O.O. (for Forward Observation Officer) while World War I was still being fought. Curiously, no trace of Street appears in Quarterly Army List of this period or of later periods. Immediately after the war, he tried his hand at thrillers before launching his two highly successful series. Between the wars, Street was stationed in Ireland and Central Europe, and while maintaining a steady production of two novels a year in each of his series, he also published a number of political works that grew out of his firsthand experience. His intelligence experience during World War II was put to use in such Desmond Merrion novels of the war years as Up the Garden Path and Situation Vacant (1946). He continued to write at a steady pace into his seventies and died at a hospital near his Seaford home in Sussex.

Analysis

The John Rhode novels are essentially locked-room mysteries. Rhode did not practice the hermetically sealed locked-room mystery of John Dickson Carr, however, so the device is primarily useful for circumscribing the incidents of the story. Understanding how the murderer had access to the victim is usually less the focus of interest than is the cause of death. Rhode was a master at finding unusual causes of death and was particularly adept at developing new variations on poisoning. Rhode is also justly famous for the atmospheric presentation of special settings such as the antique car rally of The Motor Rally Mystery (1933) and the séances of The Claverton Mystery (1933).

The Murders in Praed Street

Both Ellery Queen and Melvyn Barnes have singled out The Murders in Praed Street (1928) as one of Rhode’s best books because it shows how the story of serial killings can avoid monotony. Barzun and Taylor, on the other hand, criticize the book because Priestley blunders conspicuously into the action of the case, getting himself nearly gassed in the process. If not necessarily better, Priestley is certainly more characteristic (and Rhode is more comfortable) when he has ceased such active participation in cases.

Death in Harley Street

A good example of Rhode at his best and an excellent illustration of his method of fair play is Death in Harley Street (1946). The death mentioned in the title has already occurred before the story opens. The police have dismissed as a rather bizarre accident the death of Dr. Richard Knapp Mawsley, who seems to have injected himself with a fatal dose of strychnine. Someone might have entered the consulting room after hours, but it is hardly credible that Mawsley would have accepted an injection of strychnine without putting up a struggle. From the police description of the scene and of the events leading up to Mawsley’s death, Priestley is able to posit the existence of a missing letter and hypothesize (accurately, as it develops) its contents. This dazzling demonstration of his reasoning powers is a red herring, however, for it supports the theory of suicide, which is no more accurate than the official coroner’s verdict of accidental death. Early in the book, Priestley theorizes that this case must be a special instance of a violent death that cannot be explained as suicide, as accident, or as murder. While the police are pursuing missing wills and the whereabouts of the butler on his night out, Priestley uncovers a secret relationship based on facts and attitudes from Mawsley’s past that are clearly indicated to the reader. Priestley’s theory of the special nature of this death is vindicated at last when he administers a poison to himself to prove how the death occurred. Most readers will be less fastidious about terminology than Priestley and will count the final explanation as indicating murder, however subtle the guise.

The Dr. Lancelot Priestley Series

The Priestley series evolves in several ways over its thirty-six-year span. Superintendent Hanslet of the earlier novels retires, and the younger, more energetic, and somewhat more naïve Jimmy Waghorn replaces him and later rises to the rank of superintendent himself. On the other hand, this change of personnel does not alter Priestley’s working procedures. In addition, his Saturday dinners continue to be attended by Hanslet and Waghorn. These dinners are also attended by Dr. Mortimer Oldland in the later books. The primary way the books change is that Priestley becomes a more sedentary person over time. Like Nero Wolfe, he seldom leaves home in these later books. Because he was already elderly at the start of the series, this is hardly surprising, but he reveals his true character when he ceases pursuing facts entirely and participates in the cases only as a disinterested analyst. A third way in which the books in this series change is, unfortunately, that after World War II they become somewhat more mechanical and less imaginative.

It is often remarked that Rhode had no gift for characterization; Nicholas Blake has called Rhode’s characters ciphers. Although Priestley is allowed as a grand exception to the generalization, there are problems of two sorts with this appraisal. The type of mystery that Rhode wrote is concerned primarily with an intellectual puzzle. Well-rounded characterization is not merely unnecessary, it is inappropriate. The unimportance of characterization to the form in which Rhode was working is perhaps indicated by the inconsistencies in the names of some of his major continuing characters. Dr. Oldland witnesses a will as Sidney Oldland in The Claverton Mystery, but his given name appears to be Mortimer in Death at Breakfast (1936). Even Priestley himself absentmindedly initials a note to his secretary with “J. P.” in The Ellerby Case (1926). Although the character of Superintendent Hanslet appears throughout the series, his given name is never revealed. Within the limitations of his genre, however, Rhode’s characterizations are more than competent. Except for a few later books in which he is clearly not writing up to his best standard (for example, The Fourth Bomb, 1942; By Registered Post, 1953; and The Fatal Pool, 1960), the characterizations are various and have a realistic probability in context. No murderer is ever, for example, revealed as having committed his crime because of secret passions about which the reader could not have known anything.

On the other hand, the characterization of Priestley is not well rounded, nor could it have been. Priestley is not so much a character as a symbol for rational deduction. What seem at first glance to be quirks of character prove on analysis to be part of the theory of detection embodied by the books. For example, Priestley’s cavalier willingness to let some criminals get away with murder is really Street’s comment on the art of John Rhode rather than Rhode’s comment on the morals of Lancelot Priestley. Street does not mean that it ought to be possible to get away with murder, but in fact it is often possible to do so in the real world. When Priestley dismisses the murderer at the end of Death in Harley Street with the bland advice that he “not carry [his] experiments in toxicology any further,” Rhode is acknowledging that it would be extremely difficult to convict the guilty party in this case, and Street is allowing the reader the pleasure of being an aesthetic observer of the ethical dilemma. No comment on the real world is intended.

Priestley’s occasional regret at the passing of the old order is, like his willingness to allow an artful murderer to get away with his crime, less personal characterization than a necessary part of the nostalgia of the puzzle mystery as a genre. As David I. Grossvogel has said of Agatha Christie’s first readers, Rhode’s first readers wished to “purchase at the cost of a minor and passing disturbance the comfort of knowing that the disturbance was contained, and that at the end of the story the world they imagined would be continued in its innocence and familiarity.” As with Christie, this tenuous keeping of sordid realities at arm’s length could not survive the devastations of World War II, as Rhode’s uncertain tone and inconsistent performance in the novels of the 1950’s testify.

When the setting is outside London, Priestley can receive only occasional reports on the progress of a case. When this is so, as in Death of a Godmother (1955), the fact that the brief scenes in which he appears are intrusive also helps rebut the familiar understanding of Priestley as a triumph of characterization. Priestley is a brilliant idea, but he is a triumph of plot and point of view, not of characterization.

In addition to the more than six dozen novels about Priestley, there are three short stories, “The Elusive Bullet,” “The Vanishing Diamond,” and “The Purple Line,” the first two written for original anthologies. “The Elusive Bullet” is the only work in which Priestley gets kissed (he does offer a deathbed kiss of peace in Tragedy on the Line, 1931), and even here he is only being thanked for resolving a case.

The Secret of High Eldersham

The Desmond Merrion and Henry Arnold series by Miles Burton was an attempt by Rhode to be more lighthearted. Although for the most part he succeeded, the general standard of the series falls somewhat behind that of the Priestley books. One of the best novels in this series is the first, The Secret of High Eldersham (1930). This tale of witchcraft, murder, and smuggling shows a nice balance of action and analysis. Merrion meets his wife in this story, but Inspector Arnold has yet to appear.

Other Works

Despite Rhode’s association with puzzle mysteries both as Rhode and as Burton, he began his career in detective fiction as Street with a number of thrillers, A.S.F.: The Story of a Great Conspiracy (1924), The Double Florin (1924), and The Alarm (1925). Barzun and Taylor note A.S.F. as a particularly effective 1920’s thriller in its depiction of the cocaine traffic. Rhode’s reticence about his personal life extended to his craft as a writer. The appendix to The Floating Admiral (1931), which was written a section at a time by the members of the Detection Club, includes the solution each writer had in mind at the time he wrote his section, but Rhode gives a straightforward summary of his solution without theoretical asides. His book-length study of a real murder in The Case of Constance Kent (1928) is highly regarded for its elucidation of the case, but it offers no insight into Rhode’s workings as a mystery writer. He did, however, provide a useful history of the Detection Club in the introduction to an anthology called Detective Medley (1939).

Only one mystery novel by Rhode or Burton has been made into a film. In 1936, The Murders in Praed Street became Twelve Good Men under the direction of Ralph Ince. The film stars Henry Kendall, Nancy O’Neil, Joyce Kennedy, and Percy Parsons. The writers Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat did an excellent job of providing a clear and suspenseful screenplay, yet Priestley does not appear, a testament perhaps to the extent to which he is an observer of rather than a participant in the main action of the novels in which he appears.

Principal Series Characters:

• Dr. Lancelot Priestley , a great ratiocinator in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes, solves his cases by analysis rather than investigation and relies on others to bring him the facts for analysis. An academic chemist by training, he is retired from the academic life before the series begins. No wife is mentioned in the series, although a daughter, April, appears in the first book, The Paddington Mystery (1925).
• Jimmy Waghorn , honest, easygoing, and fair, rises rapidly through the ranks of the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard, eventually becoming a superintendent. Only once (in Twice Dead, 1960) does he solve a case without being given at least a strong hint from Priestley, but he is far from being the sort of official bungler encountered by Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance.
• Desmond Merrion is a private detective and a more active participant in his cases than is Priestley. In Miles Burton’s World War II novels, Merrion becomes an intelligence agent. Although married, Merrion spends long periods away from home investigating crimes. Mrs. Merrion has an active role in some of the novels of this series (for example, Heir to Murder, 1953, Murder in Absence, 1954, and Found Drowned, 1956), but like Superintendent Waghorn’s wife, Diana, in the later books of the Priestley series, she is all talk without insight.
• Inspector Henry Arnold is a more active police detective than either of Priestley’s superintendents, and he and Merrion are more active partners in unmasking criminals. Merrion and Arnold have an engaging relationship that involves constant bickering and differences of opinion but with an underlying mutual respect.

Bibliography

Barnes, Melvyn. “John Rhode.” In Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by John M. Reilly. 2d ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Combined biography, bibliography, and criticism of Rhode and his works.

Barzun, Jacques, and Wendell Hertig Taylor. A Catalogue of Crime. Rev. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1989. List, with commentary, of the authors’ choices for the best or most influential examples of crime fiction; provides perspective on Rhode’s works.

Cuppy, Will. Introduction to World’s Great Detective Stories: American and English Masterpieces, edited by Will Cuppy. Cleveland: World, 1943. Rhode is included in this anthology of detective fiction by recognized masters in the genre, and the introduction justifies his inclusion in their rarefied company.

Knight, Stephen Thomas. Crime Fiction, 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. This work looks at the history of the detective novel, containing a chapter on club-puzzle forms, which includes locked-room mysteries such as those of Rhode.

Routley, Erik. The Puritan Pleasures of the Detective Story: A Personal Monograph. London: Gollancz, 1972. Idiosyncratic but useful discussion of crime fiction in terms of nominally puritanical ideology; sheds light on Rhode’s work.

Steinbrunner, Chris, and Otto Penzler, eds. “John Rhode.” In Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. Examines Rhode’s distinctive contribution to genre fiction.