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:
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.)
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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