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 - Death at Breakfast

John Rhode was probably at the height of his fame when he published Death at Breakfast in 1936. It's long been a hard-to-find novel, but not any more, thanks to a paperback reissue by Harper Collins which uses the splendid (if not quite true to the storyline) original cover artwork. It's another example of a reissue that, a few years ago, would have seemed an impossible dream.

But is it any good? Well, yes, I think it is. This isn't an entry in the publishers' Detective Story Club, so there is no introduction, but there is a prologue - not a device that Rhode commonly used, I believe, though I have to say that there are over 100 of his detective novels that I haven't read. We're introduced to the miserly and unpleasant Victor, who is anticipating some kind of mysterious windfall. Suffice to say, the reader is not heartbroken when Victor quickly meets his death as a result of nicotine poisoning.

At first, suspicion falls on his half-sister and her brother. But soon it becomes clear that the mystery is more complex than seemed to be the case. Superintendent Hanslet and young Jimmy Waghorn make a nicely contrasted pair of detectives, but for all their talents, they find it necessary to consult Dr Lancelot Priestley when the puzzle become hard to solve.

Hanslet is not impressed by some of Priestley's reasoning, and naively concludes that the great man, who is getting on in years, may be losing his grip. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. I figured out the central trick in the story quite some time before the two cops, but that didn't much lessen my pleasure in an entertaining mystery. Rhode was a capable craftsman, and he built his plots with care. This is a pretty good one.