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 - Invisible Weapons

Invisible Weapons, first published in 1938, is one of John Rhode's innumerable mysteries; it's been hard to find for many years, but has now reappeared in a new paperback edition from Harper Collins. Rhode fans will, I'm sure, be absolutely delighted, as the chances of finding a first edition in decent nick at an affordable price are negligible. And it's a story which, in many ways, strikes me as typical of Rhode, both in terms of his strengths and his weaknesses.

Let's take the strengths first. The book is divided into two parts, and concerns two distinct crimes (although it's surely not a spoiler to reveal that there is a connection between them). The first victim is an elderly man, who is murdered in highly mysterious circumstances in the home of a doctor, while a police officer is present in the house. It's a locked room killing, and nobody can figure out how the crime was committed, even though there are strong reasons to suspect the doctor, who has been living beyond his means, and whose wife was the deceased's heir.

When the riddle is finally solved by Dr Lancelot Priestley, it turns out to be a variation of an old trick, but very pleasingly handled. There's also a complicated puzzle about the death of a rich and soon-to-be-married man in the second half of the book. Once again, Rhode deals with the mechanics of the crime in an assured way. He was a man with a practical turn of mind, and like Dorothy L. Sayers, he was rather more interested in howdunit than whodunit.

But, unlike Sayers, he had no ambitions as a literary stylist, and therefore the culprit's ingenious m.o. is the focus of interest. The culprit's character and motivation are of very subordinate importance, and here, as so often with Rhode, I found this a little frustrating. A murderer who indulges in such over-elaboration really deserves to have his crime investigated by a sleuth as formidable as Priestley!