Forgotten Book - Death at the Dance

Death at the Dance, which dates from 1952, is apparently one of the rarest of the books that Cecil John Street wrote under the name John Rhode. So I count myself as very fortunate that I was given a reading copy by someone I never met - a lady called Susan Smith, who asked her daughter to arrange to pass on to me some of her detective novels after she died, simply because she thought I'd be glad to read them. Susan evidently amassed a huge collection over the years, some of them acquired from public libraries which were disposing of old stock. Her extraordinarily generous gesture has indeed given me plenty of reading pleasure and quite a few of the 'forgotten books' I've covered here came from her collection.

This story is set in Cornwall, although Rhode never names the county, and fictionalises various locations. So I think we can deduce that 'Hadeston' is a version of 'Helston', while the dance that gives rise to murder is presumably Rhode's take on the Floral Dance. At the start of the story, crowds line the streets to watch the dance. A widowed woman is taken ill and dies, only for it to emerge that someone has managed to inject her with poison. But the police are baffled, given that there is nobody who appears to have a good reason to kill her. 

Jimmy Waghorn is called in, but he too finds the case bewildering. So too the spate of burglaries that have been taking place in the neighbourhood. I did feel that there was a diffusion of interest between the two plot strands, and the story only really came to life when a second murder is committed in unusual circumstances.

Once again, Dr Priestley acts as armchair detective, but it's Jimmy who does the investigative work - even roaming the countryside on a borrowed push-bike. Given the connection between arsenic and tin-mining, which is mentioned in the story, I did wonder if an arsenic labyrinth was going to be mentioned (anticipating my own novel The Arsenic Labyrinth by more than half a century) - but alas! It was not to be. 

There are some contrivances in the plot which I found unconvincing and this meant that I didn't rate it as highly as, say, Licensed for Murder (another book which came from Susan's collection). But it's still a decent read, with unusual elements that lift it out of the ordinary.