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Book Review: VEGETABLE DUCK (1944) by John Rhode

2/8/2022

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Of the 80+ books I managed to read last year, the majority were from authors of classic detective fiction and five of them were penned by the prolific Cecil John Charles Street. Under the pseudonyms of John Rhode and Miles Burton, Street wrote (or, in the later half of his career, dictated) about 140 mysteries, and I find myself returning every couple months to try another title on this lengthy and impressive list. Why do I keep traveling these Rhodes, covering these Miles? What’s the attraction with this particular Street?
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With 1944’s Vegetable Duck, generally acclaimed as one of the author’s greatest successes, I am reminded again about the supreme comfortability generated when I read a story featuring Dr. Lancelot Priestley or Inspector Jimmy Waghorn. First, the writing is clear and forthright; Street’s prose stays away from any clutter, whether literary or introspective, that may slow the storytelling.

Next, the puzzle and its attendant questions – whodunit, how, and why – drive the plot with few, if any, detours or cul-de-sacs. Additionally but importantly, the crimes on display fully meet the spirit of classic detective fiction: they are usually curious and colorful, and the death of a character (and that character’s personality) is considered and dispassionate enough that the dispatching can be viewed as part of the puzzle and not as a grievous loss to humanity. In short, the Rhode and Burton stories are often extremely pleasing examples of the genre, comfortable and competent and very easy to process and enjoy.
 
There is another admirable asset on display in Vegetable Duck that kept this reader engaged and turning the pages. As mentioned, the inciting puzzle at the start of the story is specific and central: how was Letty Fransham fatally poisoned during dinner, and who is responsible? But the author quickly provides multiple related mysteries, equally intriguing, that will help answer these questions and that need to be investigated on their own merits. And Street weaves his principal and supporting puzzle threads masterfully throughout the tale. Who provided a mysterious phone message that called husband Charles Fransham away just before dinner was served? What connection might the country shooting death of Mrs. Fransham’s brother years earlier (with fellow hunter Charles a prime suspect) have to the poisoning? And who has been sending crude letters to Charles promising revenge for the brother’s death? Could it mean that it was Charles and not his wife who was the intended victim?
 
All of these tangential mysteries pop up in the book’s first chapters, with more taking shape as the story continues and another murder is committed. The most celebrated aspect of Vegetable Duck is the clever method employed to saturate a marrow with digitalis, but its brilliance in revelation is dulled somewhat because the enigma is not teased or solved through reader-collected clues. Instead, it’s presented as a show-and-tell demonstration by Dr. Priestley in Chapter 12, and thus takes on the quality of a lecture instead of an intellectual question for the reader to pursue. The many other clues that line Duck’s garden path –from a belated letter in the post that might have rescued Letty Fransham from her deadly dinner to a disguised visitor to that Mundesley Mansions flat days earlier – are relevant and fair-play, and their contributions give the plot a satisfying and propulsive fullness.
 
What’s more, Street incorporates elements of one of the most perplexing true-crime stories ever told, the 1931 murder of Julia Wallace in her home. According to his testimony, a phone call from a stranger arranging an after-hours business meeting with William Herbert Wallace led him on a fruitless search for an address that didn’t exist. Upon returning home, he recruited a neighbor to help him with a front door that would not open. They found Julia Wallace dead by the hearth, her head battered and lying on her husband’s raincoat. The case seems to turn on the strange summons that got William out of the apartment: if the call was genuine, who would have arranged this? Or was the message – taken down the day before by a fellow member at Wallace’s chess club and given to him – from Wallace himself, setting up an alibi so he could commit murder? That alluringly mysterious phone call clearly intrigued the author; he used the concept here and in his later novel The Telephone Call (1948).

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And if you are not from the United Kingdom and wonder about the book’s curious name and this era-specific recipe (and even what a marrow is), I am happy to share my findings. It turns out that vegetable duck need not contain duck; it is instead the filling and baking of minced meat inside a hollowed-out marrow. A marrow is similar to a zucchini, but larger with stripes and a thicker skin. Get yourself a lovely Churchyard Salad courtesy of Malcom Torrie to accompany, and John Rhode’s Vegetable Duck will surely be satisfying, if lethal. In the U.S., Dodd, Mead & Company published the book under the rather generic and not very apposite title Too Many Suspects as part of their Red Badge Mystery series a year later.
 
TomCat reminds me that botanical shenanigans can also be found in The Man Who Grew Tomatoes by Gladys Mitchell in his Duck review at Beneath the Stains of Time. Other blogs that have sampled this John Rhode dish include The Grandest Game in the World, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Martin Edwards’ Crime Writing Blog, The Passing Tramp, and Pretty Sinister Books.

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Book Review: INVISIBLE WEAPONS (1938) by John Rhode

10/12/2021

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Invisible Weapons offers two crimes for the price of one: in the book’s first half, Inspector Jimmy Waghorn investigates the murder of Robert Fransham, a man found dead from a blow to the head in his brother-in-law’s home. The entrance to the washroom where Fransham’s body is found just happened to be under surveillance by a trustworthy constable at the time of his death, while the sole window leading outside was watched by the man’s chauffeur. The second half concerns the death by carbon dioxide poisoning of Sir Godfrey Branstock. In the latter case, the coroner reaches a verdict of accidental death due to a leak of sewer gas in Sir Godfrey’s wine cellar. In the former case, Waghorn and his superior, Superintendent Hanslet, focus on the one man with a clear motive: Fransham’s brother-in-law, Dr. Thornborough.
 
Are the two deaths related? Dr. Priestley seems to think so. If so, how was Robert Fransham struck down when he was alone in a room? And where is the weapon? Consensus from bloggers and readers place Invisible Weapons as a solid but unremarkable entry from author Cecil John Charles Street’s more than 140 detective stories published under the names John Rhode and Miles Burton. I would agree with that assessment: it is a breezy, fast read, aided by the two-for-one structure and a good representative title to show the author’s interest in plot and investigatory procedure with minimal interest in character development or complicated motives. It is also one of the few John Rhode titles currently in print, thanks to the recent publication of this book and three others by HarperCollins, who have resurrected the Collins Crime Club imprint.
 
As workaday as this genre story is, Street provides a few spots of enjoyable character development, such as the presence of Alfie Prince, a mentally deficient tramp who goes door to door asking for cigarettes and gets angry when denied his pleasure. I also appreciated the spirited speech of a neighbor named Willingdon, which shows that the author can infuse characterization through dialogue when he chooses to. (Much more often, Jimmy Waghorn will ask a question or two of a person and receive straightforward paragraphs in reply that read like a dispassionate witness statement.)
 
As reviewers have noted, it is the remarkable obtuseness of the police – and their complete failure to connect the dots without Dr. Priestley’s help – that strains credulity the most here. Hanslet in particular is fixated on Dr. Thornborough for Fransham’s murder, an unshakeable belief built principally on the fact that the suspect is the only one with an apparent motive: Fransham was about to change his will, and the doctor had recently fallen upon financial hardship. To his credit, Waghorn stops short of arresting Thornborough because he feels evidence is lacking. No one involved questions why a man would invite a near-estranged relative to his own home and then murder him under mysterious circumstances when an accident away from the estate would have generated far less suspicion and achieved a better effect.
 
Some proposed secondary theories are also head-scratching and unconvincing, yet Superintendent Hanslet accepts them as possible, no grain of salt needed. One example: because tramp Alfie (or at least his singular coat) was seen in the neighborhood of Adderminster shortly before the murder, one speculative idea is that Dr. Thornborough managed to get Alfie to kill for him. The doctor, knowing that Alfie’s mental stability sometimes caused blackouts and memory loss, would be safe as he could trust his assassin to promptly forget his role. Hanslet is astute enough to consider variations and scenarios like that one, but logic and common sense are given only to amateur criminologist Priestley. 

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​Perhaps it is for this reason that Dr. Priestley, with secretary Harold Merefield in tow, spends some of the later pages visiting the houses and poking around the washrooms and cellars himself. As the police view has calcified into stubborn dogma, the doctor’s rare outing is needed so he can gather additional facts that will explain the strange circumstances of each man’s death.
 
This is also one of those tales where quite a bit of luck and coincidence needs to go the murderer’s way, from the trajectory of the weapon to a rented truck sitting in a garage on the premises and conveniently overlooked for days after the crime. Perhaps that all comes with the territory of mystery fiction; it’s a pleasant enough garden path up which to walk. Just don’t look too closely at the reality of the details, either of the criminal’s fragile plan or of the policeman’s remarkable ignorance.
 
In part because of the modern reprinting, many reviews of Invisible Weapons can be found online. Among the learned bloggers spilling some virtual ink: TomCat at Beneath the Stains of Crime; Puzzle Doctor at In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel; Nick at The Grandest Game in the World; Martin Edwards at his Crime Writing Blog; and JJ and Aidan offer a detailed, spoiler-stuffed discussion at The Invisible Event.  

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Book Review: ROBBERY WITH VIOLENCE (1957) by John Rhode

8/23/2021

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At first, it was a bank theft with no violence at all. Overnight, someone removed nearly £ 9,000 from a locked holding room of a bank in the town of Fendyke using no force and leaving no clues. Suspicion fell on the staff, but no single worker had all of the keys to access the room and the safe at one time. The violence came months later: one rainy night, police discover the body and motorcycle of a widely disliked businessman named Edgar Chelmsford in a ditch. The petrol line on the cycle had been smashed loose and the spilled gasoline had rather surprisingly caught fire. The victim had apparently received a blow to the head that had stunned him. Superintendent Jimmy Waghorn is called in to investigate both crimes. Are the two incidents linked, and if so, what was the chain of cause and effect that led to murder?
 
First, the good news. This late-period John Rhode title incorporates an agreeable and rather faultless (from a logical puzzle standpoint) minor mystery. There are no loose ends, and the psychology driving motives and mea culpas, both for the theft and the murder, is straightforward and effective. As with nearly all of the many mysteries produced by Cecil John Charles Street over more than three decades (including his miles of Miles Burton books), Robbery with Violence is an easy and enjoyable read. It is certainly not one of Street’s strongest books, but it has an admirable clarity and cleanness in its plotting and prose.
 
However, two criticisms can be leveled at this title, and perhaps at much of the author’s 1950s output in general; both elements threaten to reduce the reader’s satisfaction with the story. First, we learn from Curtis Evans in his immersive overview volume Masters of the “Humdrum” Mystery (2012) that, by the late 1940s, Street was narrating the texts of his books into a Dictaphone, which a secretary would then type out. As one can imagine, this verbal approach changes the prose structure, and Robbery with Violence is filled with character monologues that spill on for paragraph after paragraph and page after page. Actual dialogue – a back-and-forth of questions and answers between detective and suspect or witness – is supplanted by a speech where the character inevitably covers all the relevant information with no prompting.
 
Added to this, the later Rhode/Burton books have a dogged devotion to formula that can make the proceedings feel uninspired. Street was dismissively classified by critic Anthony Boucher as a “Humdrum” detective fiction writer, a craftsman only interested in replicating a story from a genre template (here, a crime, a police investigation, and interviews and clues that lead to a solution) with no greater literary aspirations. It is admittedly difficult not to view the author’s prolific oeuvre as a “cranking out” of books, especially in the later years. Curtis Evans offers this quote from Barzun & Taylor’s A Catalogue of Crime regarding a 1947 Rhode title:

"Rhode now goes about his plots like a contractor; the deliberate laying out of equipment on ground carefully surveyed generates a powerful tediousness."
There is one more criticism to level at poor Mr. Street and his rather myopic Superintendent, and it is one that readers may understandably find hard to forgive. I still contend that Robbery with Violence is an enjoyable read, BUT it is a mystery that most readers will be able to solve the moment enough information becomes available. (And the author does play fair and present all the straw with which to make the bricks, as usual.) 
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Golden Age detective fiction fans far more astute than I will have no problem identifying culprit(s) and intuiting motives and means for both crimes long before Jimmy Waghorn manages it. (Most of it came together for me as early as Chapter Five.) It doesn’t help that the policeman spends many middle chapters building a case against a suspect with a motive and little else to tie him to the murder. Even the sedentary Dr. Priestley, who does nothing here but sits after dinner with eyes closed and drops hints that Waghorn misinterprets or ignores, seems a little exasperated. It is never good when the reader is waiting for the detective to catch up, and this too is not unique in the Street canon. One can sympathize with the author trying to lead us up the garden path, but doing so means his detective can’t be blind to obvious questions and details the reader is tracking all along.

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Book Review: DEATH AT THE HELM (1941) by John Rhode

7/13/2021

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Cecil John Charles Street published more than one hundred mystery novels under his two main pseudonyms of John Rhode and Miles Burton. While genre critic Julian Symons dismissed Street and fellow puzzle crafters Freeman Wills Crofts and J.J. Connington as writers of the “humdrum” school, I continue to find the Rhode and Burton books highly enjoyable and immensely readable. But why exactly? What makes Street’s unadorned, straightforward murder investigations so engaging?

It appears to be partly the embracing and expert use of those very elements Symons was quick to relegate as humdrum. These are narratives that offer prose rarely ornamented with literary flourishes or digressive social or cultural commentary. Focus is less on the nuanced psychological study of people than on the puzzle at its core, with suspect alibis, opportunities, and motives driving the detective’s whodunit quest. Characters are given enough flesh and detail to personalize and individualize them, but there is little need for elaborate detail to provide either satiric color or kitchen-sink verisimilitude. The humdrum approach, one could argue, is closer to a solve-for-X algebraic formula than to any novelistic exploration of guilt or justice.

It is bracing, then, when an author like Street delivers not only a first-rate mystery in the humdrum style but also an engaging character drama that fully supports the puzzle journey at its heart. 1941’s Death at the Helm strikes exactly this satisfying balance, and succeeds on two levels: as a whodunit with a streamlined group of suspects that keeps the reader guessing at the solution until the book’s final pages; and with enough emotional intrigue and empathy built into the characters and their plights that at least two of them stay with you after the story concludes. Helm has two beautifully delivered surprises at the story’s resolution. I don’t want to elaborate on these for fear of spoiling the journey, but I will say that one is integrated into the murder puzzle’s solution and the other involves an ethical point that is delivered compellingly and memorably by the author.


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The plot: Inspector Jimmy Waghorn investigates the deaths of two people found onboard a motor cruiser that has run aground near a fishing village on the English coast. George Farningham and Olga Quarrenden appear to be victims of poisoning, with a highly suspect bottle of a novelty cocktail called Hampden’s Gin Blimp as a possible vehicle for murder. Learning that the fated couple was trapped in an impossible affair – the woman’s husband, unyielding King’s Counsel barrister Hugh Quarrenden, had refused to grant a divorce and a public scandal would likely destroy Farningham’s business career – Waghorn is inclined to believe the secret meeting aboard the boat and the subsequent deaths were a result of a planned suicide pact. But Dr. Priestley recommends that the inspector keep digging, and this he does literally, finding a beach that the couple visited the day of their deaths and discovering beside a stream a spot where the roots of the deadly hemlock water dropwort plant had been dug out and collected.

All component elements of Death at the Helm work perfectly here, and Street’s pacing is typically agreeable. His plots tend to be procedural in the sense that we usually view the investigation through the perspective of his worker-bee policemen, and the discovery of new evidence or information will dictate the detectives’ next moves. The narrative takes some very satisfying twists and turns, and unlike some of the Rhode or Burton stories, for once the reader likely won’t get ahead of the inspector by spotting the solution early. Deliciously, Helm tantalizes us with a prime suspect in the form of the formidable, cagey Hugh Quarrenden, the one man with a clear motive for both murders and the legal intelligence to commit the perfect crime. But Waghorn and the reader are hesitant to accuse, and in the final chapter the barrister springs an unexpected but very satisfying surprise.

As to the murder method employed, Street has done his homework. The all-knowing Internet explains that the hemlock water dropwort oenanthe crocata is indeed native to British waterways and resembles a harmless herb leaf plant like parsley or cilantro, with its roots forming a parsnip-like vegetable. It is also “the most poisonous plant in the UK” and has been responsible for multiple deaths from ingestion over the decades. One website notes that the phrase “sardonic grin” refers to hemlock dropwort poisoning of criminals in ancient Sardinia, as the facial muscles constrict from asphyxia.

Uncomfortable death throes for its unfortunate victims aside, Death at the Helm is one of the best John Rhode stories I have encountered, as sure in its sailing as ever a humdrum mystery navigated its course. I managed to find a Dodd Mead U.S. edition copy through a college interlibrary loan; one hopes that this title finds its way to a reprint publisher very soon!
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