Sun 23 Oct 2011
Reviewed by Richard & Karen La Porte: JOHN RHODE – The Claverton Affair.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[7] Comments
JOHN RHODE – The Claverton Affair. Dodd Mead, hardcover, 1933. Perennial Library, paperback, 1986. First published in the UK as The Claverton Mystery: Collins, hardcover, 1933.
In this classic tale of crime and detection the scholarly Dr. Lancelot Priestley undertakes the solution of the untimely death of an old friend, Sir John Claverton.
The inquest rules it as death by natural causes (severe gastric ulcer-like internal damage) but Priestley feels that there are other factors involved. Sir John had just signed a new will that made radical changes in the disposition of his rather substantial estate.
The beneficiaries now include his estranged sister Clara Littlecote, her daughter Helen, a young cousin, Ivor Dunford; who is a chemist and, as an enigma, a Mrs. Muriel Archer and her daughter, a girl of fifteen.
John Rhode tells a penetrating story of greed, imposture and misdirection, reserving the final dismantling of the plot for a rigged seance to confront the villain with proof of his crime. Dr. Priestley’s rationalizations are fully explained at long and sometimes pedantic length but his careful attention to detail sifts the almost undetectable clues out until the killer’s fiendish method is disclosed.
Time and science have advanced a long way since this book was originally published in 1933, but the classic battle of wit and erudition does not suffer from a half century of progress.
Editorial Comment: Richard and Karen La Porte were well-known mystery fans in the 1980s, and this issue of Poisoned Pen contains a dozen or more of their reviews.
I have editor-publisher Jeff Meyerson’s permission to reprint the reviews, which I think are well done, but I’ve no success in getting in touch with the La Porte’s themselves. The most recent Google reference to either of them is from the early 1990s.
Conferring with Jeff and several others who knew them, we’ve decided that they’d be pleased to see their reviews online. We hope we’re correct in choosing to do so. This one is the first, with more to come.
October 23rd, 2011 at 6:09 pm
This book is one of my favorites of the Dr. Priestley novels. I think the consensus is that is truly one of his best out of his prolific output. I understand that he becomes much of an armchair detective around the late 1950s. Here he is very active in the investigation and the climax with the staged seance is brilliant. The villain is a nasty piece of work and his method (with the very apt adjective used by the LaPortes above) one of the most fiendish in all (yes, all!) of the Golden Age era.
October 23rd, 2011 at 7:38 pm
The reviews the LaPorte’s did, as I hope you’ll see over the next few weeks, were seldom long (certainly not long-winded) but invariably precise in their choice of words. I agree with both your assessment of CLAVERTON, John, and theirs, one hundred percent.
We didn’t realize it at the time — took it for granted, we did — but Perennial Library did every fan of Classical Detection a huge favor with their line of reprint paperbacks from (mostly) the Golden Age. Authors like John Rhode, Henry Wade, Matthew Head, Lange Lewis, Michael Innes, Clifford Witting, Michael Gilbert, EilÃs Dillon, Anna Wells, Douglas Clark, Bruce Hamilton, C. W. Grafton, not to mention good solid thriller writers like John Welcome, Charles Williams, Andrew Garve, and Ross Thomas (Oliver Bleeck).
If I happen to have gotten some authors in the wrong category, please forgive me!
October 24th, 2011 at 8:45 am
To continue with the same theme, at the same time, in the late 1980, there was another publisher with perhaps an even larger list of Classic Detective paperbacks: International Polygonics. Authors such as John Dickson Carr/Carter Dickson, Ellery Queen, Craig Rice, Margaret Millar, Hake Talbot, Anthony Boucher, Clayton Rawson and (as they say) many more.
https://mysteryfile.com/IPL/Checklist.html
I never saw their books on sale anywhere at the time, but Carroll & Graf did a lot of GAD reprints in paperback too. The late 80s was a second Golden Age of Detection, no doubt about it.
October 24th, 2011 at 9:16 am
Thank you for an interesting review!
There are comments on a number of John Rhode mysteries at my website:
http://mikegrost.com/rhode.htm
The novel known as Death in the Hop Fields (1937) in Britain and The Harvest Murder in the US, is available free on-line at the Hathi Trust:
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015063959442
They have a number of Golden Age novels, including Crofts and Connington.
October 24th, 2011 at 1:31 pm
Good reviews and commentary, as usual, Mike. Thanks for the link!
I don’t wish to get into trouble for this, in case I’m wrong, but from my experience the later Rhode’s are not nearly as good as his earlier ones.
His books as Miles Burton I seem to have liked more, but again nobody should take any great meaning in that statement, as I’ve not read many, and maybe I happened to have read the better ones.
October 26th, 2011 at 2:30 pm
The 1980s were a great time for paperback reprints. when I started reading classic mysteries again in the 1990s you could get so much classical stuff at the bookstores. Today, no.
I liked the science in this one a lot. Quite fiendish.
May 12th, 2022 at 3:39 am
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