The Robthorne Mystery

The Robthorne Mystery is a 1934 detective novel by John Rhode, the pen name of the British writer Cecil Street.[1] It is the seventeenth in his long-running series of novels featuring Lancelot Priestley, a Golden Age armchair detective. It was published in the United States the same year by Dodd Mead.[2]

The Robthorne Mystery
First Edition (UK)
AuthorJohn Rhode
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
SeriesLancelot Priestley
GenreDetective fiction
PublisherCollins Crime Club (UK)
Dodd Mead (US)
Publication date
1934
Media typePrint
Preceded byThe Venner Crime 
Followed byPoison for One 

Synopsis

Warwick Robthorne is found dead on Guy Fawkes Night in the greenhouse of his twin brother's country home, apparently having committed suicide. This coincides with a police operation in London led by Inspector Hanslet against a gang of drug smugglers. It falls to the gifted criminologist Dr. Priestley to tie the evidence between the two cases together.

Literary Significance

Reviewing the book for The Sunday Times, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote, "One always embarks on a John Rhode book with a great feeling of security. One knows that there will be a sound plot, a well-knit process of reasoning, and a solidly satisfying solution with no loose ends or careless errors of fact."[3]

Isaac Anderson in The New York Times remarked that "no one who has ever read a Dr. Priestley story will be surprised to learn that this is a genuinely baffling crime puzzle of the first quality".[4]

References
  1. Evans p.247
  2. Reilly p.1257
  3. Sayers, Dorothy (2017). Edwards, Martin (ed.). Taking Detective Stories Seriously: The Collected Crime Reviews of Dorothy L. Sayers. p. 111. ISBN 978-0-9563374-9-8.
  4. "THE ROBTHORNE MYSTERY. By John Rhode. 287 pp. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co. $2". The New York Times. 5 August 1934. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 30 September 2023.

Bibliography
  • Evans, Curtis. Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961. McFarland, 2014.
  • Herbert, Rosemary. Whodunit?: A Who's Who in Crime & Mystery Writing. Oxford University Press, 2003.
  • Reilly, John M. Twentieth Century Crime & Mystery Writers. Springer, 2015.


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