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Rhode, John

Page history last edited by J F Norris 12 years ago

John Rhode

John Rhode was one pseudonym used by the prolific English author Cecil John Charles Street (1884-1964) -- known as 'John' -- who also wrote as Miles Burton and Cecil Waye. Street lived at Seaford and produced four detective novels a year for thirty-seven years. He was a serving British army officer who attained the rank of Major. He also wrote non-fiction, focussing on history and criminology.

 

Street was reticent about his background, but there is evidence that he was born in Gibraltar and may have attended a public school in Berkshire, possibly Wellington College. He was awarded a Military Cross and an OBE.

 

Street's two main series are the Dr Lancelot Priestley books under the Rhode name, and the Desmond Merrion/Inspector Henry Arnold books under the Burton name. The Priestley books are classics of scientific detection, with the elderly Dr Priestley demonstrating how apparently impossible crimes have been carried out. Priestley ages through the series and by the last books must be well into his eighties, but his faculties are unimpaired. The Burton series are more traditional detective fiction with the addition of chases and the occasional romance; in fact the hero, amateur investigator Desmond Merrion, meets his wife in the first, The Secret of High Eldersham (1930).

 

Curt on Cecil Street's family and life

 

1890: A Cecil John C. Street, born about 1885 in Gibraltar was living in Surrey.

 

1901: A 16 year old Cecil John Chas Street, born Gibraltar, was living at a school in Crowthorne, Berkshire. This surely would have been Wellington College, the famous school for sons of English army officers opened in 1859. An Alfred Benjamin Street, 14, born in India, was also attending at this time.

 

The wife of John Street, esq., Royal Artillery, gave birth to a son in Gibraltar in 1828. John Street, esq., Capt., Royal Artillery, died in 1829 at Clifton in Gloucestershire.

 

Cecil John Charles Street, the author (let's call him GAD Street, in honor of GAD), was born in 1884 and served as a Captain in the Royal Artllery in World War One.

 

There doesn't seem much doubt to me that the Cecil John Charles Street in the 1890 and 1901 census records is our GAD Street and the Gibraltar and Royal Artillery connections would seem to connect him to the Captain John Street, esq. who died in 1829 -- possibly a grandfather (or gr-gf, as the son born in 1828 would have been about 56 when our GAD Street was born).

 

His father is still a mystery, but it appears to me that he died before 1891, when Street was a small child. His mother, seems to have been Caroline (Bill) Street, daughter of Charles Horsfall Bill, originally of Storthes Hall in Yorkshire. Charles Horsfall Bill was in the Hussars, which fits a statement I read that both his grandfathers were in the military.

 


 

Mike Grost on John Rhode

 

Even at his best, John Rhode's Dr. Priestley tales are pretty mild stuff. The best I have read is The Elusive Bullet (1931). This story is plainly inspired by Freeman's "The Blue Sequin" (1908), with perhaps a dash of S.H. Adams' "The One Best Bet" thrown in. This story, and The Purple Line, are unusual in that they are solved through mathematical analysis - this is very rare in mystery fiction; it is consistent with Dr. Priestley being a mathematician. Dr. Priestley's character is that of a snappish old grandfather, the sort of character E. Nesbit burlesqued as the Psammead in Five Children and It (one of my favorite titles). By contrast, I didn't like "The Vanishing Diamond", the highly touted novels The Claverton Affair (1933) and Death in Harley Street (1946), or the Rhode - John Dickson Carr collaboration, Drop To His Death (1939). These tales are in no way offensive, but they lack inspiration.

 

Rhode also published novels under the pseudonym Miles Burton, usually about wealthy investigator Desmond Merrion. Two of these share much common imagery: his first Merrion book, The Secret of High Eldersham (1931), and The Shadow on the Cliff (1944). Merrion is an ex-Navy Intelligence Officer, and he always loves being on boats. So does his man Norwood. Norwood does sleuthing too, and is fantastically helpful, in the tradition of such sleuth-servants as R. Austin Freeman's Polton, H.C. Bailey's Sam, Dorothy L. Sayers' Bunter, and Margery Allingham's Lugg. These writers are all in the Realist school, or the Bailey school that partially derives from it.

 

The Shadow on the Cliff has a good background of English country life. It focuses not on the country homes of the rich, but a more working to middle class environment: farms, country inns, fishermen, and the countryside itself. Rhode liked stories set in small villages. He also had a fondness for settings of pubs, typically as places where dirty work was done in small communities. Rhode liked hired hands as characters. These include assistant innkeepers, farmhands, and factotums on country estates. Such people take part in a network of relationships in his villages. They also tend to be ignored by other Golden Age writers, so they gave Rhode something original to write about. Rhode likes to suspect higher ups: in Ask a Policeman, these are at the highest strata of English society; in Cliff and Eldersham, they are the local authority figures and rich people. There is a distinct strand of anti-authoritarianism in his personality. Rhode's characters get around by a great variety of transportation; unlike other realist school writers, he liked old fashioned kinds like horses and buggies, as well as wheelbarrows and dollies. Rhode likes scenes in church graveyards. People often work at night in Rhode: Gruber in his workshop in Cliff, the farmers in Eldersham, the many pub keepers in his books, the soldiers in Night Exercise. Although they often stay up all night detecting, Rhode's characters crave sleep more than anything. Rhode also liked nocturnal settings. He was fascinated by lamps of all kinds, flashlights, the moon, and any other source of illumination. He is very good at describing both moonlight and fog.

 

In his stories the detective often seems to stay in the same room previously occupied by the murder victim, an odd approach not found in many other modern writers, even sleeping in the murder victim's bed. In his first novel, The Paddington Mystery (1925), the hero actually discovers the corpse in his own bed and bedroom. One can find some precedents in Victorian writers: in Volume 1, Chapter 13 of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1861 - 1862), the detective hero who is tracking the fate of his missing, probably murdered best friend and roommate, falls asleep on his friend's bed, and has a memorable dream about the detective search he is on. Similarly, Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Story of the Physician and the Saratoga Trunk" (1878) in New Arabian Nights has a scene in which the protagonist finds a corpse in his bed. Stevenson read Braddon's book as a teenager, and it made a deep impression on him.

 

H.C. Bailey's characters like sensory stimulation, from strongly flavored foods, flowers, bright colors, and religious rituals. The many quotes in his stories, often from songs and hymns, also bombard his characters with music and poetry. I can identify with Bailey's characters - I share all the same enthusiasms listed above. By contrast, Rhode's like tobacco, alcohol, drugs, meat and the sea. This is much harder for me to identify with: I have never smoked, drinked, used drugs or gambled, and am definitely NOT an addictive personality, unlike many of the characters in Rhode.

 

Rhode's men love to disguise themselves. The disguises tend to cover his men's heads, and enlarge them; there is clearly something phallic about such imagery. While some men are emphasizing their phallic characters with their disguise, the witch cultists in Eldersham are uniformly dressed in women's clothes, both men and women, according to witch tradition. This gives an androgynous effect. All of the imagery in Rhode, whether substances or disguise, tends to a transformative quality. Characters wish to change their identity or nature, especially at night. Rhode's heroines tend to be androgynous. Mavis in Eldersham is a Tomboy, drives speed boats, and is called more like a boy than a girl by one of the characters. The stepmother in Cliff manages the estate. The heroine of Cliff is a Naval Officer, a Wren, and wears a uniform. Her aunts are single women who run a farm, do much heavy labor, and dress in mannish work clothes. Feminists will like these gutsy characters, but feel sorry that they never get to do any amateur detection. By contrast, women who show traditional femininity are treated with contempt. These include the overdressed Mrs. Gruber in Cliff, and the society woman in Eldersham. These ladies don't work and are dependent on men. They are rotten to the core, in Rhode's world view.

 

Rhode liked to include elements of small time crime in his plots, especially dealing with the illegal sale of meat by farmers. This allows for plot complication, and also establishes a certain air of raffishness and disrespect for law among his villagers. Although the killing of farm animals is a constant in Rhode's world, it has sinister overtones. It is often linked to overtones of human sacrifice, for example, through parallelisms in the plot (Eldersham) or surrealistic imagery (Chapter 7 of Cliff). There are stone altars in both books with hints of human sacrifice: the pagan altar in the grove in Eldersham, and the natural rock Tregeagle's Bed in Cliff.

 

The Shadow on the Cliff shows Rhode's skill at plotting a fairly complex story, and having all the pieces dovetail properly. Rhode contributed the superb opening section of Ask A Policeman, setting up the plot, the murder, the characters and their movements and motives. He didn't do any more, as befits the first chapter of a round robin. In some ways, Cliff is also all set-up material. It is pure mystery storytelling all the way through, and pretty well done. There is little "fair play" or great creativity with puzzle plot in the Agatha Christie sense. At the end of the story, we learn one of the characters did it, but there is no especially creative mystery puzzle idea in the solution. There is also little detection by any classical definition. The detectives learn things mainly by being told them by witnesses. Eventually, the detective gets a theory, which seems to be right. The solution continues the good storytelling of the rest of the novel by a well told account of the crime. It is most pleasant to read, but more as a piece of storytelling than for superb revelations. The passivity of the detective is mirrored by other characters. The author creates an excellent spunky heroine, and then nearly drops her from the novel's second half. The young hero of the story also almost disappears.

 

The Secret of High Eldersham (1931) is one of those mysteries that degenerates into a thriller. It starts out with a murder mystery, but by the end of the book all focus on this has been lost. This is too bad, because much of the book is well written. Chapters 12 - 16 form a separate section, largely dealing with the river and a mystery thereon. Rhode's detective Merrion eventually solves this mystery, uncovering an ingenious criminal scheme. Both the river navigation and the criminal scheme show the influence of Freeman Wills Crofts. Merrion's romance with Mavis, fears that her father is involved with the crime, and desire to protect her family from the authorities recall the amateur detective hero of Crofts' The Pit-Prop Syndicate. Similarly, the spies' communication scheme in The Shadow on the Cliff seems Croftsian.

 

Both Eldersham and Cliff start out in a pub, then move on to an outdoor setting in the English countryside. This setting, a river in Eldersham and a cliff in Cliff, is described with full Golden Age devotion to landscape architecture. Although no maps are included in the books, one could easily draw a map of both settings. Rhode loved landscape. The landscape literally speaks out at the end of The Shadow on the Cliff, in a way that reminds one of the modern theories of J. G. Ballard.


 

 

Bibliography

 

As John Rhode

 

ASF (1924)

The Double Florin (1924)

The Alarm (1925)

The Paddington Mystery (1925)

Dr Priestley's Quest (1926)

The Ellerby Case (1927)

The Murders in Praed Street (1928)

Tragedy at the Unicorn (1928)

The House on Tollard Ridge (1929)

The Davidson Case aka Murder at Bratton Grange (1929)

Peril at Cranbury Hall (1930)

Pinehurst (1930) aka Dr. Priestley Investigates

Tragedy on the Line (1931)

The Hanging Woman (1931)

Mystery at Greycombe Farm (1932) aka The Fire at Greycombe Farm

Dead Men at the Folly (1932)

The Motor Rally Mystery (1933) aka Dr. Priestley Lays a Trap

The Claverton Mystery (1933) aka The Claverton Affair

The Venner Crime (1933)

The Robthorne Mystery (1934)

Poison for One (1934)

Shot at Dawn (1934)

The Corpse in the Car (1935)

Hendon's First Case (1935)

Mystery at Olympia (1935) aka Murder at the Motor Show

Death at Breakfast (1936)

In Face of the Verdict (1936)

Death in the Hopfields (1937) aka The Harvest Murder

Death on the Board (1937) aka Death Sits on the Board

Proceed with Caution (1937) aka Body Unidentified

Invisible Weapons (1938)

The Bloody Tower (1938) aka The Tower of Evil

Drop to His Death (1939) aka Fatal Descent

Death Pays a Dividend (1939)

Death on Sunday (1939) aka The Elm Tree Murder

Death on the Boat Train (1940)

Murder at Lilac Cottage (1940)

Death at the Helm (1941)

They Watched by Night (1941) aka Signal For Death

The Fourth Bomb (1942)

Night Exercise (1942) aka Dead of the Night

Dead on the Track (1943)

Men Die at Cyprus Lodge (1943)

Death Invades the Meeting (1944)

Vegetable Duck (1944) aka Too Many Suspects

Bricklayer's Arms (1945) aka Shadow of a Crime

The Lake House (1946) aka The Secret of the Lake House

Death in Harley Street (1946)

Nothing But the Truth (1947) aka Experiment in Crime

Death of an Author (1947)

The Paper Bag (1948) aka The Links in the Chain

The Telephone Call (1948) aka Shadow of an Alibi

Blackthorn House (1949)

Up the Garden Path (1949) aka The Fatal Garden

The Two Graphs (1950) aka Double Identities

Family Affairs (1950) aka The Last Suspect

Dr Goodwood's Locum (1950) aka The Affair of the Substitute Doctor

The Secret Meeting (1951)

Death in Wellington Road (1952)

Death at the Dance (1952)

By Registered Post (1952) aka The Mysterious Suspect

Death at the Inn (1953) aka The Case of Forty Thieves

The Dovebury Murders (1954)

Death on the Lawn (1954)

The Domestic Agency (1955) aka Grave Matters

Death of a Godmother (1955) aka Delayed Payment

An Artist Dies (1956) aka Death of an Artist

Open Verdict (1956)

Robbery with Violence (1957)

Death of a Bridegroom (1957)

Murder at Derivale (1958)

Death Takes a Partner (1958)

Licenced for Murder (1958)

Three Cousins Die (1959)

Twice Dead (1960)

The Fatal Pool (1960)

The Vanishing Diary (1961)

 

As Miles Burton

The Hardway Diamonds Mystery (1930)

The Secret of High Eldersham (1930) aka The Mystery of High Eldersham

The Three Crimes (1931)

The Menace on the Downs (1931)

Death of Mr Gantley (1931)

Murder at the Moorings (1932)

Fate at the Fair (1933)

Tragedy at the Thirteenth Hole (1933)

Death at the Cross Roads (1933)

The Charabanc Mystery (1934)

To Catch a Thief (1934)

The Devereux Court Mystery (1935)

The Milk Churn Murder (1935) aka The Clue of the Silver Brush

Death in the Tunnel (1936) aka Dark is the Tunnel

Murder of a Chemist (1936)

Where is Barbara Prentice (1936) aka The Clue of the Silver Cellar

Death at the Club (1937) aka The Clue of the Fourteen Keys

Murder in Crown Passage (1937) aka The Man With the Tatooed Face

Death at Low Tide (1938)

The Platinum Cat (1938)

Death Leaves No Card (1939)

Mr Babbacombe Dies (1939)

Murder in the Coalhole (1940) aka Written in Dust

Mr Westerby Missing (1940)

Death Takes a Flat (1940) aka Vacancy With Corpse

Death of Two Brothers (1941)

Up the Garden Path (1941) aka Death Visits Downspring

This Undesirable Residence (1942) aka Death at Ash House

Dead Stop (1943)

Murder, MD (1943) aka Who Killed The Doctor

Four-ply Yarn (1944) aka The Shadow on the Cliff

The Three Corpse Trick (1944)

Not a Leg to Stand On (1945)

Early Morning Murder (1945) aka Accidents Do Happen

The Cat Jumps (1946)

Situation Vacant (1946)

Heir to Lucifer (1947)

A Will in the Way (1947)

Death in Shallow Water (1948)

Devil's Reckoning (1948)

Death Takes the Living (1949) aka The Disappearing Parson

Look Alive (1950)

Ground for Suspicion (1950)

A Village Afraid (1950)

Beware Your Neighbour (1951)

Murder Out of School (1951)

Murder on Duty (1952)

Heir to Murder (1953)

Something to Hide (1953)

Murder in Absence (1954)

Unwanted Corpse (1954)

Murder Unrecognised (1955)

A Crime in Time (1955)

Found Drowned (1956)

Death in a Duffle Coat (1956)

The Moth Watch Murder (1957)

The Chinese Puzzle (1957)

Bones in the Brickfield (1958)

Death Takes a Detour (1958)

Return from the Dead (1959)

A Smell of Smoke (1959)

Legacy of Death (1960)

Death Paints a Picture (1960)

 

As Cecil Waye

Murder at Monk's Barn (1931)

The Figure of Eight (1931)

The End of the Chase (1932)

The Prime Minister's Pencil (1933)

 

Comments (1)

Jon said

at 9:35 am on Jun 16, 2010

Here's a Top Fifty of sorts, though of course people will differ (I starred 30 personal favorites at the moment). Generally speaking, the best books are from the thirties and forties. It took Street a few years to get really warmed up in the twenties and his fifties books include some clunkers, especially in the later part of the decade.

I can't comment on the Burton title Death of Two Brothers and the two of the Cecil Waye titles, as I have not read them.

RHODE
The Ellerby Case
The Murders in Praed Street
*The House on Tollard Ridge
*The Davidson Case
Pinehurst
*The Hanging Woman
Dead Men at the Folly
*The Motor Rally Mystery
*The Claverton Mystery
*The Venner Crime
*The Robthorne Mystery
*Poison for One
*Shot at Dawn
*The Corpse in the Car
*Hendon's First Case
*Mystery at Olympia
*Death on the Board
*Proceed with Caution
*Invisible Weapons
*The Bloody Tower
*Death on the Boat Train
*Death at the Helm
*They Watched by Night
*Dead on the Track
*Men Die at Cyprus Lodge
*Vegetable Duck
The Paper Bag
The Telephone Call
*Family Affairs
*The Secret Meeting
Death at the Dance
Death at the Inn
Licensed for Murder

BURTON
*The Secret of High Eldersham
To Catch a Thief
The Devereux Court Mystery
*Death in the Tunnel
Murder of a Chemist
Death at the Club
*The Platinum Cat
Death Leaves No Card
Mr. Westerby Missing
Up the Garden Path (Death Visits Downspring)
*Murder M. D.
*The Three Corpse Trick
*The Cat Jumps
Situation Vacant
Death Takes the Living
Ground for Suspicion
Bones in the Brickfield

Most of these are hard to find, alas. Ramble House has reprinted Death Leaves No Card and A Smell of Smoke and plans to reprint some Rhodes. I hope if I can get a book deal it may get Street and these other "Humdrum" authors some more attention again. Aside from Freeman Wills Crofts, who was reprinted by House of Stratus (those editions, now ten years old, are themselves collector's items today), they have languished.

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