Proceed with Caution is a 1937 detective novel by John Rhode, the pen name of the British writer Cecil Street. 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.
Synopsis
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.
Literary Significance
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."
Bibliography
- Evans, Curtis. Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery: Cecil John Charles Street, Freeman Wills Crofts, Alfred Walter Stewart and the British Detective Novel, 1920-1961. McFarland, 2014.
- Magill, Frank Northen . Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction: Authors, Volume 3. Salem Press, 1988.
- Reilly, John M. Twentieth Century Crime & Mystery Writers. Springer, 2015.