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THE writer best known as ‘John Rhode’ was born Cecil John Charles Street on 3 May 1884 in the British territory of Gibraltar. His mother was descended from a wealthy Yorkshire family and his father was a distinguished Commander in the British Army who—at the time of his son’s birth—was serving in Gibraltar as Colonel-in-Chief of the Second Battalion of Scottish Rifles.

Shortly after his birth John Street’s parents returned to England where, not long after John’s fifth birthday, his father died unexpectedly. John and his widowed mother went to live with her father, and in 1895 John was sent to Wellington College in Berkshire. John did well in his academic studies and, perhaps unsurprisingly given the approach he took to detective stories, he excelled in the sciences. At the age of 16, John left school to attend the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich and, on the outbreak of the Great War, as it was then called, he enlisted, rising to the rank of Major by March 1918. While he was wounded three times, John Street’s main contribution to the war effort concerned the promulgation of allied propaganda, for which he was awarded the Order of the British Empire in the New Year Honours List for 1918 and also the prestigious Military Cross. As the war came to an end John Street moved to a new propaganda role in Dublin Castle in Ireland, where he would be responsible for countering the campaigning of the Irish nationalists during the so-called war of Irish independence. But the winds of change were blowing across Ireland and the resolution—or rather the partial resolution—of the ‘Irish Question’ would soon come in the form of a treaty and the partition of the island of Ireland. As history was made, Street was its chronicler, at least from the British perspective.

During the 1920s, other than making headlines for falling down a lift shaft, John Street spent most of his time at a typewriter, producing a fictionalised memoir of the war and political studies of France, Germany, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, as well as two biographies. He also wrote a few short stories and articles on an eclectic range of subjects including piracy, camouflage and concealment, Slovakian railways, the value of physical exercise, peasant art, telephony, and the challenges of post-war reconstruction. He even found time to enter crossword competitions and, reflecting his keen interest in what is now known as ‘true crime’, he published the first full-length study of the trial of Constance Kent, who was convicted for one of the most gruesome murders of the nineteenth century at Road House in Kent. John also found time to write three thrillers and a wartime romance. However, while his early books found some success, the Golden Age of detective stories had arrived, and he decided to try his hand at the genre.

The first challenge was to create a great detective, someone to rival the likes of Roger Sheringham and Hercule Poirot, with whose creators John Street would soon be on first name terms. Street’s great detective was the almost supernaturally intelligent Lancelot Priestley, a former academic, who in the words of the critic Howard Haycraft was ‘fairly well along in years, without a sense of humour and inclined to dryness’. Dr Priestley’s first case, published in October 1925, would be The Paddington Mystery. Doctor—or rather Professor—Priestley was an immediate success, and Street was quick to respond, producing another six novels in short order. As well as Priestley, Street’s ‘John Rhode’ novels often feature one or both of two Scotland Yard detectives, Inspector Hanslet and Inspector Jimmy Waghorn who would in later years appear without Priestley in several radio plays and a short stage play.

By 1930, John Street was no longer just a highly decorated former Army Major with a distinguished career in military intelligence—he had now written a total of 25 books under various pseudonyms. He was 45 years old, and he was just getting started. As ‘John Rhode’ he would produce a total of 76 novels, all but five of which feature Dr Priestley and one of which was based on the notorious Wallace case. But, while writing as ‘John Rhode’, Street also became ‘Miles Burton’, under which pseudonym he wrote 63 novels featuring Desmond Merrion, a retired naval officer who may well have been named after Merrion Street in Dublin. There also exists an unfinished and untitled final novel, inspired it would appear by the famous Green Bicycle Case. The ‘Rhode’ and ‘Burton’ detective mysteries are similar, but whereas Priestley is generally dry and unemotional, Merrion is more of a gentleman sleuth in the manner of Philip Trent or Lord Peter Wimsey. Both Merrion and Priestley are engaged from time to time by Scotland Yard acquaintances, all of whom are portrayed respectfully rather than as the servile and unimaginative policemen created by some of Street’s contemporaries.

But two pseudonyms weren’t enough and, astonishingly, ‘Rhode’ also became ‘Cecil Waye’, a fact that was only discovered long after his death. For the four ‘Cecil Waye’ books, Street created two new series characters—the brother and sister team of Christopher and Vivienne Perrin, two investigators rather in the mould of Agatha Christie’s ‘Young Adventurers’, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. The Perrins would appear in four novels, which are now among the rarest of John Street’s books. Curiously, the first ‘Cecil Waye’ title—Murder at Monk’s Barn—is a detective story very much in the style that he would use for most of his ‘John Rhode’ and ‘Miles Burton’ books. However, the other three are metropolitan thrillers, with less than convincing plots, especially the best-known, The Prime Minister’s Pencil.

As well as writing detective stories, John Street was also a member of the Detection Club, the illustrious dining club whose purpose, in Street’s words, was for detective story writers ‘to dine together at stated intervals for the purpose of discussing matters concerned with their craft’. As one of the founding members, Street’s most important contribution was the creation of Eric the Skull, which—showing that he had not lost his youthful technical skills—he wired up with lights so that the eye sockets glowed red during the initiation ceremony for new members. Eric the Skull still participates in the rituals by which new members are admitted to the Detection Club. Street also edited Detection Medley, the first and arguably best anthology of stories by members of the Club, and he contributed to the Club’s first two round-robin detective novels, The Floating Admiral and Ask a Policeman, as well as the excellent true crime anthology The Anatomy of Murder and one of their series of detective radio plays. Street was also happy to help other Detection Club members with scientific and technical aspects of their own work, including those giants of the genre Dorothy L. Sayers and John Dickson Carr; in fact Carr later made Street the inspiration for his character Colonel March, head of The Department of Queer Complaints.

In an authoritative and essential study of some of the lesser luminaries of the Golden Age, the American writer Curtis Evans described John Street as ‘the master of murder means’ and praised his ‘fiendish ingenuity [in] the creative application of science and engineering’. For Street is genuinely ingenious, devising seemingly impossible crimes in locked houses, locked bathrooms and locked railway compartments, and even—in Drop to his Death (co-authored with Carr)—a locked elevator. Who else but Street could come up with the idea of using a hedgehog as a murder weapon? A marrow? A hot water bottle? Even bed-sheets and pyjamas are lethal in his hands.

Street’s books are also noteworthy for their humour and social observations, and he doesn’t shy from defying some of the expectations of the genre: in one novel Dr Priestley allows a murderer to go free, and in another the guilty party is identified and put on trial … but acquitted.

John Street died on 8 December 1964. Half a century later, while he is not as highly regarded by critics as, say, Christie, Carr or Sayers, he remains one of the most popular writers of the Golden Age, producing more than 140 of what one fan neatly described as ‘pure and clever detective stories’. Not a bad epitaph.

TONY MEDAWAR

November 2017