Proceed with Caution | |
Author: | John Rhode |
Country: | United Kingdom |
Language: | English |
Series: | Lancelot Priestley |
Genre: | Detective |
Publisher: | Collins (UK) Dodd Mead (US) |
Release Date: | 1937 |
Media Type: |
Proceed with Caution is a 1937 detective novel by John Rhode, the pen name of the British writer Cecil Street.[1] [2] It is the twenty-seventh 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 under the alternative title Body Unidentified.[3]
Superintendent Hanslet and Inspector Waghorn of Scotland Yard respectively investigate a diamond robbery and a suspicious death. A consignment of valuable jewels have gone missing while being transported from Hatton Garden. Meanwhile a corpse is found in a tar burner in a Kent village, completely unrecognisable. It takes the genius of Dr. Priestley to demonstrate how these two events are linked.
E.R. Punshon writing in The Guardian felt " If only Mr. Rhode were a little more careful with his characterisation, if only his literary style were a little less pedestrian, he would take an even higher place than that his persistent—and consistent—ingenuity has won for him."