Tragedy on the Line

By John Rhode and Curtis Evans

A body on the tracks and a pair of missing wills have Dr. Priestley puzzled . . .
 
Gervase Wickenden’s estate is close to a railroad line—and that’s where his mangled body is found after an unfortunate meeting with a train. The timing is a bit odd though, considering this happened only two days after Wickenden changed his will. And now, neither version of the will can be located . . .
 
The heirs ask Dr. Lancelot Priestley to look into the matter of the missing documents, but he soon stumbles on something else entirely: evidence that the train was not the actual cause of death. It’s up to him to deduce the facts behind this fatal so-called accident, in a compelling British mystery by a Golden Age master.
 
“You can never go far wrong with a Dr. Priestley story.” —The New York Times

• Language: English
• Publisher: MysteriousPress.com Open Road
• Release date: Jan 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9781504072809

John Rhode

John Rhode was born Cecil John Charles Street in 1884. He was the author of 140 novels under the names John Rhode, Miles Burton, and Cecil Wade before his death in 1964.

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Introduction

by Curtis Evans

During the Golden Age of detective fiction, which spanned the years between the first and second world wars, England’s Maj. Cecil John Charles Street was one of the best-known and most accomplished writers of classical, puzzle-oriented mystery tales. Under his most famous pseudonym, the punning John Rhode, John Street was especially admired for his fiendishly clever, yet scientifically rigorous murder methods.

If Major Street’s drinking buddy and fellow detective novelist, the ingenious American expatriate John Dickson Carr, was the Golden Age’s lord of the locked room mystery, Street himself was vintage mystery’s master of murder means. The murder plots Street intricately devised in his John Rhode tales typically revolve around diabolically deadly applications of science and engineering; they are in the impeccable manner of his lauded predecessor R. Austin Freeman, creator of the greatest rival of Sherlock Holmes, medical jurist Dr. John Thorndyke.

For Golden Age readers interested in credible scientific detection of material facts, Street’s John Rhode was, along with Anglo-Irish railroad engineer Freeman Wills Crofts and Scottish chemist Alfred Walter Stewart (aka J. J. Connington), the preeminent mystery author of his generation. Golden Age crime writer and critic E. R. Punshon tellingly dubbed John Rhode Public Brain Tester No. 1.

The man who became John Rhode was born in Gibraltar on May 3, 1884, the son of Gen. John Alfred Street, a veteran of the First Opium and Crimean Wars who for five years in the 1870s had commanded British forces in Ceylon, and the general’s much younger second wife, Caroline Maria Bill, a daughter of wealthy landed gentleman, Charles Horsfall Bill. Young John’s father enjoyed but a brief retirement in England, passing away somewhat suddenly at his residence Uplands in Woking, Surrey, in 1889, when John was only five. Caroline Street thereupon relocated with John to live with her father at nearby Firlands, a home comfortably staffed with seven domestics.

For a time John Street followed in his distinguished late father’s martial footsteps, graduating from Wellington College (originally founded to educate sons of deceased army officers) and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and receiving a commission from the Royal Artillery in 1903. However, at twenty-two he transferred from the regular army into the special reserves three years later. That same year Street wed twenty-four-year-old Hyacinth Maud Kirwan, a daughter of a major in the Royal Artillery.

Although possessed of ample private means, Street—who since adolescence had been fascinated with mechanics and applied science (on his father’s side of the family he descended from Rev. John Jardine, a noted figure in the Scottish Enlightenment)—spent the years before the outbreak of the First World War as chief engineer of the Lyme Regis Electric Light & Power Company.

After killing shots were fired at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, and the great nations of Europe went to war in August, England called John Street back into military service. Perhaps for Street public conflict provided relief from private sorrows. Performing with bravery and distinction on the western front as a forward observation officer in the Royal Garrison Artillery, special reserve, Captain Street was wounded three times and received the Military Cross. From April to November 1918, Street, having been promoted to the rank of major, headed the MI7b, a branch of British Military Intelligence devoted to the production of press propaganda and the study of foreign presses. He later served as an information officer at the headquarters of the British administration in Ireland, Dublin Castle, between 1919 and 1921, where he controversially became what one Irish authority has called the senior British propagandist in Dublin Castle during the Black and Tan War [or Irish War of Independence].

During the Great War, Street revealed a literary bent in 1916 publishing two well-received volumes of memoirs of his frontline experiences in the conflict, With the Guns and The Making of a Gunner, which he followed with a semi-autobiographical war novel in 1917, The Worldly Hope. After returning to England in 1921, Street began publishing books on contemporary European politics, reflecting his recent immersion in intelligence work. (Today he might have become a frequent guest on 24/7 cable news programs and even, heaven forbid, a serial tweeter.)

1924 presaged a pivotal shift in Street’s writing career when he published, in addition to the political treatises East of Prague and The Treachery of France, two crime thrillers, A. S. F. and The Double Florin, the latter under the pseudonym John Rhode, an obvious play on his own surname.

With the emergence of his first Dr. Lancelot Priestley detective novel, The Paddington Mystery, the following year, Street firmly established his career as a mystery writer. Over the next thirty-five years he would produce, primarily under his two major pseudonyms, John Rhode and Miles Burton, over 140 mystery novels (mostly classical tales of detection), an average rate of four a year, making him one of the most prolific pure detective fiction writers in the history of the genre.

Priestley, the series detective in most of the seventy-seven John Rhode novels, is an acerbic and disputatious scientist (a mathematician in the earliest novels) with a penchant, not unknown in learned gentlemen in detective fiction of his day, for amateur crime investigation. Likely, Street derived his greatest detective’s surname, in a nod to the Age of Enlightenment, from eighteenth-century English chemist and natural philosopher Joseph Priestley, author of The History and Present State of Electricity (1767).

In the earlier Priestley novels the elderly doctor is ambulatory and gets out to inspect crime scenes himself, along with his loyal secretary, Harold Merefield (who is also Priestley’s son-in-law, having married the widowed scientist’s flippant flapper daughter, April, who then promptly vanished from the books). Later on in the series, however, Priestley becomes almost entirely a classic armchair sleuth, a thinking machine brilliantly elucidating the complex criminal problems brought before him by his attendant policemen: Inspector (later Superintendent) Hanslet and, as the series progresses, Hanslet’s younger, posher, college-educated underling, James Jimmy Waghorn, who over the course of the series falls in love, marries, and becomes a superintendent himself.

Two other characters who appear multiple times in the John Rhode novels are eminent pathologist Sir Alured Faversham and Dr. Mortimer Oldland, the latter of whom eventually comes to serve, along with a now-retired Hanslet, as a participant in Priestley’s weekly post-prandial ratiocinative round tables. During these, the trio of inquisitive old men, with Harold and Jimmy in devoted attendance, analyze Waghorn’s latest murder investigations (if deemed sufficiently intriguing). Invariably the dogged Priestly sagely guides Waghorn to the criminal culprit, after having chided him for having fallen yet again for the fatal allure of conjecture.

After the Great War, Major Street found happiness with another, more congenial woman in his life: Eileen Annette Waller, a daughter of a prominent native Irish electrical and civil engineer. John and Eileen enjoyed a peripatetic life together, residing snugly in a series of villages in southern and central England and taking leisurely cruises in the Baltic, Mediterranean, and Caribbean Seas. The couple, who married after Maud Street’s demise in 1949, remained together until John’s own death at the age of eighty on December 8, 1964. England’s grand old man of mystery remained remarkably productive until near the end of his life, publishing his last Priestley detective novel in 1961, just three years before his passing. Indeed, so immense was John Street’s plotting capacity that he once drolly invited mystery writer Christianna Brand, a brilliant younger comember of the Detection Club who confessed to him that she was suffering from writer’s block: My dear, come down to my place—I’ve got rows and rows of my books, look though them and use one of my plots, you’re most welcome. Unquestionably the good major had murderous imagination to spare.

Prologue

Well, that’s that! exclaimed Mr. Gervase Wickenden, rising slowly to his feet, and stretching himself. We’ve talked enough business for one evening, surely? Let me fill up your glass, Hoddinott? When those purchases are completed you can drop me a line from your office in London.

The solicitor followed his client’s example, and walked across to the fire, which was blazing merrily. The two men were alone in Mr. Wickenden’s study at Colingrove House, a room which typified the luxury with which its owner loved to surround himself. Mr. Hoddinott stood for a moment, stretching his hands out towards the blaze, while his host mixed him a generous whisky and soda from a decanter and syphon which stood on a table in the corner of the room.

Well, here you are, said Mr. Wickenden, handing him the glass. That’s how you like it, I think. Here’s jolly good health. It’s a pity you can’t stay for a day or two, now you’re down here, and see the place properly. I’ve made several improvements to it since I bought it five years ago next month.

Mr. Hoddinott shook his head regretfully. I wish I could, he replied. I was very much taken with the place when I first saw it, and I should very much like to see how it has developed in your hands. But, as you know, I am a busy man. I have no option but to return to London by the first convenient train to-morrow morning.

If you must, it is no use trying to persuade you to stay. The best train in the morning is the 9.25 from Tawminster. It does not stop at our local station, Upton Bishops, unfortunately. But I’ll give orders for the car to run you into Tawminster station. You ought to be ready by a quarter to nine, as it’s a twelve mile drive. Will that suit you?

Perfectly, replied Mr. Hoddinott. He was about to make some further remark, when a shrill whistle pierced the silence of the night, followed shortly by the deep rumble of a train, growing to a roar, and then dying away in the distance.

Mr. Wickenden glanced at the massive grandfather clock which occupied a corner of the room. Ten minutes past eleven, he remarked. Punctual to the minute. There’s no fog up the line, that’s certain. It is wonderful how that train keeps to time. I could set my watch by it, practically every night.

Very convenient, commented Mr. Hoddinott, with a smile. I remember when I first inspected this place on your behalf, I suggested that the proximity of the railway might prove a disadvantage. Don’t you find the noise of the trains a bit troublesome, especially at night?

Bless you, I’ve got so used to it that I hardly notice it. Besides, the trains are past in a few minutes: there’s no shunting or anything like that. The nearest station is Upton Bishops, and that’s more than a mile away, round the shoulder of the hill. I admit that the trains kick up a bit of a racket on a clear frosty night like this, but sometimes I assure you that you can hardly hear them, although they pass within five hundred yards of the house. And then there’s not much traffic at night, expecially at this time of year. I don’t think that you’ll find that your sleep is disturbed at all. But it does seem rather ridiculous that, though the railway is so close, you should have to go all the way to Tawminster to catch a train in the morning.

It’s worth it, if the train’s an express. I have a rooted dislike to travelling any distance in a stopping train. By the way, do you happen to know what time it arrives in London?

It gets to Paddington at 11.45. Covers the hundred and thirty odd miles in two hours and twenty minutes, not bad going. It’s quite the best train in the day, if one doesn’t mind the drive to Tawminster.

Mr. Hoddinott sipped his whisky appreciatively. You seem to be a regular student of the timetable, Mr. Wickenden, he remarked with a smile.

His host laughed heartily. I must confess that living by the railway has inspired me with an interest in its workings, he replied. Trains have always had a curious fascination for me, and I can still find pleasure in watching them go by. Passenger trains especially. It isn’t only the impression of speed and power that I get from them. I like to think of the people in them as my neighbours for one fleeting moment. Each of them is a life whose orbit approaches mine, and then as rapidly recedes, without a word being exchanged between us. It is a fanciful thought.

Mr. Hoddinott’s face assumed a puzzled expression. His client was the last man whom he would have suspected of any such flights of fancy. Yes, yes, it is indeed, he agreed absently. All very well for a man of leisure, like you. But I am afraid that most of us are too much occupied with realities to engage in unnecessary speculation.

Well, if I am a man of leisure, I have surely earned the right to enjoy that leisure in my own way. I don’t think that I knew an hour of idleness from the time I went to Canada as a boy until the time I came home again, six years ago. If I made money, it was through my own efforts, and it did not come any too easily, I can tell you that.

A hard look came into Mr. Wickenden’s face as he spoke. He paused, and the solicitor could see from his expression that his thoughts were back in the days when his whole being was concentrated upon making his fortune. A queer chap, Mr. Hoddinott thought. A man whose easy-going exterior concealed unsuspected depths. Even he himself, who had known Mr. Wickenden since he returned from Canada, a rich man, realised that he was still entirely ignorant of his inner self.

His meditations were interrupted by Mr. Wickenden’s pleasant and hearty laugh. Yes, I suppose my hobbies must seem childish to a man like you, who spends his life dealing in facts and figures in his office in Lincoln’s Inn. But you mustn’t run away with the idea that I am so bored here that I can find nothing better to do than watch the trains go past. I’ve plenty of other amusements, I can assure you. But all my life I’ve cultivated the habit of observation, and I simply can’t help noticing even such trifles as the passing of the trains. I know them off by heart, by this time. For instance, that one you heard just now was the through goods train from London to the west of England. But, good Lord, here I am on the subject of trains again! Finish your glass, and we’ll have one more before we go to bed.

The solicitor nodded, and handed over his glass to be refilled. He strolled across the room towards a large glass-fronted bookcase which occupied nearly the whole of one wall. His host, advancing glass in hand, found him inspecting the titles, with an obvious surprise in his expression.

Hullo! Looking at my books, eh? he said jovially. I’ve collected them all myself, since I’ve been here. When I took over this place, lock, stock and barrel, I found the library full of books, as you know. I went through them pretty thoroughly the first winter I was here, but I couldn’t find much to interest me. I don’t know why, because I’m told that they’re a remarkably fine collection. I suppose it was because I couldn’t find anything of sufficient human interest.

But, my dear sir! objected Mr. Hoddinott in a scandalised tone. The late Sir John Amersham, from whose executors you bought this place, was famous for his literary taste!

Mr. Wickenden shrugged his shoulders. I can’t help it, he replied with a smile. In that case, I suppose my own taste is infamous. Anyhow, I decided to buy books that interested me, and I had this case put up in here for the purpose. Now, as man to man, Hoddinott, wouldn’t you rather read my books than old Sir John’s?

The solicitor examined the titles for some moments before replying. I don’t know, he said doubtfully, at last. If mine were a criminal practice, I might agree. You seem to have collected the records of every criminal trial that has ever been published.

And plenty that have never been published, except in the newspapers, remarked Mr. Wickenden, in a tone of satisfaction. You see that row of scrapbooks? They’re full of cuttings of famous cases all arranged in order and indexed. I flatter myself that I have a record of practically every criminal trial that has taken place since my return to England.

Dear me! observed Mr. Hoddinott. I had no idea that your interest had a legal bent.

It isn’t the legal aspect of the matter that interests me, replied Mr. Wickenden. It’s the perpetual struggle between the criminal and those whose business it is to run him to earth that fascinates me. Do you know, I have always thought that crime is the most intricate of all the arts practised by man. The planning and execution of a successful crime requires brain and enterprise such as very few people possess. I don’t mean to say that the ordinary man, who commits a crime and makes so many blunders in the process that he gets arrested, is in any way worthy of admiration. But the truly artistic criminal, who achieves his object and remains unsuspected, is, in my opinion, something of a superman.

He is none the less a reprehensible character, observed Mr. Hoddinott severely.

Oh, I’m not concerned with moral aspects, exclaimed Mr. Wickenden. Of course he is reprehensible, and should be exterminated in the interests of the community. But it is impossible not to admire the ingenuity of the man who commits an elaborate crime and gets away with it.

The solicitor glanced significantly at the row of books. The very fact that these records exist shows that only very rarely does he get away with it, he remarked dryly.

Yes, and therein lies their interest. I have studied all these cases pretty thoroughly, and, in an overwhelming proportion of them, the criminal’s discovery has been due to some momentary carelessness on his part. This instant of aberration may have taken place before, during, or after the actual commission of the crime, which in itself is only the culminating point in a carefully prepared scheme of operations. But for this one, often apparently insignificant, error, the crime would have been truly successful, in the sense that it would have escaped detection.

Then your theory is that the eventual detection of crime depends more upon mistakes made by the criminal than upon the acumen of the police? suggested Mr. Hoddinott.

Hardly that, for without the acumen of the police the mistake would not assume its true significance. Let me put it another way. The police, faced with a crime of any sort, such as a murder or a theft, cannot commence the actual process which leads to the detection of the perpetrator until they have discovered what is commonly known as a clue. Now, the perfect criminal would be the man who ensures that no such clue would possibly be found. His plan of campaign would be so meticulous, so all-embracing, that it left no room for any possibility of accident. That’s what I mean by saying that he would be a superman. Read those books, and you’ll find that all great criminals failed in the end because they were merely human, and possessed the human failing of liability to error. And yet I believe that after a lifetime of study, as intensive as that which he might devote to some branch of advanced science, say, a man might render himself a perfect master of the criminal art.

A remote prospect, fortunately, remarked the solicitor. It appears that criminology is another of your hobbies, Mr. Wickenden.

Oh, that’s notorious! exclaimed his host, with a laugh. I thought everybody who knew me was aware of that. Certainly my nephews and nieces are. In fact, my collection of records is due very largely to them. One or other of them is always sending me a book that they have discovered somewhere. It’s a very good way of humouring me, I suppose. They were all down here the week-end before last: it happened to be my birthday, and I always invite them here on that occasion. We spent a whole evening discussing the possibility of the perfect crime, I remember. By the way, you have not met any of them, have you, Hoddinott?

Not in the flesh, though I have heard of Professor Baggalay, and frequently see Miss Nancy Wickenden’s name in the papers.

There are five of them, in all. Three boys and two girls. Baggalay isn’t my nephew, it’s his wife, Molly, who’s my brother’s daughter. My other brother had three children, Nancy, who’s a journalist, and whose articles you see in the papers: Hugh, who’s in the Indian Army and happens to be on leave just now, and Claud, who fancies that he’s a poet and thereby absolved from the necessity of doing anything useful. My sister, who married a Kempthorne, had one son, who’s a doctor at Tawminster, and doing very well. As I say, the whole of them were down here the week-end before last, and a very cheery party we had, I must confess.

It seemed to the solicitor that something like a shadow passed across Mr. Wickenden’s face at the recollection. Mr. Hoddinott had only reached Colingrove House that evening at five o’clock, but more than once in the course of his short visit he had found occasion to wonder what was in his host’s mind. That he contemplated some important step was evident: the instructions which Mr. Hoddinott had received indicated this without a doubt.

The solicitor determined upon a leading question. Your nephews and nieces are not in particularly affluent circumstances, are they, Mr. Wickenden? he ventured.

His host glanced at him quickly, and Mr. Hoddinott fancied that there was a gleam of suspicion in the look. Affluent circumstances? he repeated. Why, my brothers and sisters didn’t leave much behind them when they died, if that’s what you mean. They were all some years older than I, and my people had spent pretty well all that they had in setting them up in life by the time my turn came. I was pushed off to Canada, to do the best I could for myself. It was one of the little ironies of fate that I made the money while they all died more or less poverty-stricken. You wouldn’t deny that I have a perfect right to do what I like with my own, I suppose?

No, no, certainly not! replied Mr. Hoddinott hastily. You are entirely at liberty to dispose of your estate as you think best.

Mr. Wickenden made no reply to this remark. He threw away the end of the cigar which he had been smoking, and remained for several minutes gazing reflectively into the fire. But his next words, when at last they came, revealed the nature of his meditations.

These young people seem to rub along fairly well, it seems to me, he said abruptly. Basil Kempthorne has worked up a very good practice for himself at Tawminster, and always seems to be doing pretty well. He has a wife and a couple of children to provide for, but that’s his look-out. Molly has married Baggalay, who is making a bit of a name for himself as a physicist. I don’t know what his job is, or who pays him for it, but I suppose he rakes in enough to live upon pretty comfortably, one way or the other. The other three inherited a couple of hundred a year or so apiece from their mother, I believe. Nancy’s all right, she’s got a pretty good job and appears to have enough to indulge her somewhat peculiar tastes. Hugh expects his captaincy very shortly, and means to get married on the strength of it. As for young Claud, he’s quite contented to pig it in a garret and produce verses which nobody but himself understands. I don’t feel myself called upon to worry about any of them. And I have an idea that things will pan out all right in the future.

It was Mr. Hoddinott’s turn to glance curiously at the speaker. Under the circumstances, this last sentence appeared to him somewhat cryptic. Mr. Wickenden must have seen the bewilderment in his expression, for he smiled and shook his head.

No, my words do not necessarily imply what you imagine, he said slowly. To you, the future is an unknown quantity. As a lawyer, you believe that the utmost that a man can do to insure against its vicissitudes is to invest his money prudently and make wise provision for its transference to his heirs. You assume that the events of the future are unpredictable. But has it never occurred to you that science may yet find a way of penetrating the veil and of forecasting the events that lie beyond it?

This time Mr. Hoddinott was thoroughly startled. Really, I can’t say that I have ever considered such a possibility, he replied. Of course, I know that the desire to penetrate the future is universal. The existence of fortune-tellers and similar charlatans proves that. But I have never heard that they have succeeded in interpreting the future to the satisfaction of anybody but themselves and their dupes.

Ah, Hoddinott, you’re a confirmed sceptic! exclaimed Mr. Wickenden. Because you have never been confronted with evidence that the veil has been lifted, you are convinced that it never will be. A very common attitude, but one, if you will forgive my saying so, utterly unscientific. How can you maintain the impossibility of anything in the light of the progress of modern science? Ask Baggalay to draw a line between what is possible and what is impossible, and he will tell you frankly that he is unable to do so. Within the last few years science has disproved so many theories which seemed to be securely founded in the experience of the ages that no man can say definitely that any law is immutable, or any phenomenon impossible.

Certainly, thought Mr. Hoddinott, he was this evening gaining a most unexpected insight into his client’s character. He had always regarded him as the ordinary type of shrewd business man, who, having made his fortune, had retired with a determination to enjoy the pleasures of country life. Since, however, they had ended their discussion of the business which had occasioned the lawyer’s visit to Colingrove House, Mr. Wickenden had revealed himself as a man of many interests, of which this last was beyond the solicitor’s depth.

I am afraid that my scientific knowledge is not sufficient to enable me to follow you into the realms of such advanced speculations, he remarked grimly.

It’s not a matter of scientific knowledge, it’s a matter of experience! replied Mr. Wickenden impatiently. "I tell you that I am convinced that sooner or later some means of seeing into the future will be perfected. It may come a good deal sooner than you think. I have already evidence that certain favoured individuals can exercise the power, intermittently and imperfectly, I admit. If this is so, as I am