Forgotten Book - Mystery at Olympia

Not so long ago, the prospect of five of John Rhode's detective novels being republished as mass market paperbacks seemed as unlikely as the solutions to some of his more technically complicated mysteries. Rhode's books have long been popular with collectors (or at least, collectors with deep pockets), but the consensus in the publishing world was that there was no real market for them. But the British Library republished two of his Miles Burton novels with considerable success, and this breakthrough has been followed up by Harper Collins, with, so far, three more titles in paperback, plus a hardback of The Paddington Mystery due in June.

I've reviewed Death at Breakfast and Invisible Weapons previously; now it's time to take a look at Mystery at Olympia. This is a story which, on its first appearance in 1935, had a topicality and freshness about its opening scene. Rhode tried to keep up to date, and here he sets the first chapter at the Olympia Motor Show. Among the visitors is Dr Oldland, a chum of Dr Lancelot Priestley, and his professional skills are called upon when an elderly man collapses and dies from no apparent cause. The deceased, it turns out, rejoices in the name of Nahum Pershore, and Superintendent Hanslet soon has reason to suspect that he was murdered - but how, and by whom?

When Pershore's household is investigated, it becomes apparent that there have been some very strange goings-on in the run-up to his death. Someone shot him in the leg, but he made light of it, for some reason. The parlour-maid has been poisoned with arsenic. And another attempt seems to have been made on his life. In this story, unlike many of Rhode's, there's a good-sized cast of potential suspects, with a range of motives, and suspicion shifts around them in pleasing fashion.

So there are plenty of things to like about Mystery at Olympia. That said, it's also a novel that demonstrates Rhode's habitual failings. The first chapter devotes rather more than two pages to a discussion of a new motoring transmission device, but it proves not to have anything to do with the plot, and is simply a form of heavy-handed satire, when - speaking personally - I'd have been more entertained by a page or two devoted to satirising an obsession with cars. But that would have been too much for Rhode, whose love of motoring is also evident from the rather tedious The Motor Rally Mystery.

The murder method struck me as much more chancy than Rhode would have us believe, while the motive is thinly sketched. The same is true of books like The Motor Rally Mystery and Shot at Dawn, where Rhode's lack of interest in humanising his killers makes one as indifferent to their psychology and their fate as Dr Priestley, whose behaviour at the end of this novel offers an intriguing example of a Great Detective doing justice in his own inimitable way. Not a masterpiece, then, but certainly worth a look.

Forgotten Book - The Motor Rally Mystery

The Motor Rally Mystery, first published in 1933, is a John Rhode novel featuring Dr Priestley. The context for the story is a round-Britain rally, evidently inspired by a real life counterpart, which sounds more like a feat of endurance than anything else. Drivers talk quite light-heartedly about falling asleep at the wheel, and when two bodies are discovered in the crashed car of a competitor, it seems to be the result of an accident.

The discovery is, however, made by a group of three men travelling in a rival car, one of whom happens to be Harold Merefield, Dr Priestley's secretary and general dogsbody. The good doctor is intrigued by the story of the car crash, and he and his old chum Superintendent Hanslet start to look into the circumstances. It begins to look as though it may not have been an accident - but how can the crash have been contrived deliberately?

At least half the book is devoted to attempts to answer this question, and you couldn't have a clearer illustration of the difference between this type of  Golden Age fiction and present day crime crime fiction. This is a story where Rhode's interest focuses almost exclusively on the ingenious scheme dreamed up by the killer (yes, I don't think it's giving away too much to say that this is a murder story!) at the expense of pretty much everything else.

I must admit that I rather lost the will to live as the doctor and his friends analysed tyre tracks. There's an odd paradox here, in that while certain technicalities are explored in excruciating detail, the introduction into the story of a character whose role clearly points to a potential murder motive is paid little or no attention. Even by the standards of Golden Age whodunits, Rhodes' lack of interest in characterising the culprit, and at least one other suspect, is striking. For good measure, he doesn't bother with a "fair play" plot, with Priestley conducting some of the key inquiries off stage. All in all, I was very disappointed with this one. A clever murder method can be a pleasing ingredient of a mystery, but here it's the be-all and end-all. I've only read a portion of John Rhode's output, but this is the feeblest book of his that I've read so far.