TRAGEDY ON THE LINE ... A DR. PRIESTLEY DETECTIVE STORY BY: JOHN RHODE

FEATURES: TRAGEDY ON THE LINE ... A DR. PRIESTLEY DETECTIVE STORY  BY: JOHN RHODE

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A) CONDITION BOOK: VERY GOOD - HARD COVER  

B) CONDITION DUST JACKET: VERY GOOD - NOT PRICE CLIPPED ($2.00)  BRODART

C) FIRST EDITION - FIRST PRINTING - DODD MOOD AND COMPANY 1931

D) NOTE:  RHODE, PSEUDONYM OF CECIL STREET, WROTE THIS THE ELEVENTH MYSTERY TO FEATURE HIS DETECTIVE DR. PRIESTLY IN 1931. NOVEL IN FIRST AMERICAN EDITION IS SCARCE, WITH ORIGINAL DUST JACKET. SCARCE.  305 PAGES.

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BOOK GRADING CATEGORIES:

FINE

VERY GOOD

GOOD

FAIR

POOR
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About:

Tragedy on the Line is a 1931 detective novel by John Rhode, the pen name of the British writer Cecil Street.^[1] It is the tenth in his long-running series of novels featuring Lancelot Priestley, a Golden Age armchair detective who works alongside the less sharp-witted Superintendent Hanslet of Scotland Yard. It was published in the United States the same year by Dodd Mead. The wealthy Gervase Wickenden is found dead on the railway line near Upton Bishop's station. Decapitated it is at first assumed he was killed by a train, until a bullet is discovered in a nearby tree. Added to this was the suspicious fact that he had changed his will only two days before, and both the old and the new version are now missing.

Street was born in Gibraltar, son of General John Alfred Street, CB, of Uplands, Woking, and his second wife, Caroline (born circa 1850), daughter of Charles Horsfall Bill, of Storthes Hall, Yorkshire, and The Priory, Tetbury, Gloucestershire, head of a landed gentry family.^[3][4] Caroline had married comparatively late, in 1881, and her only son was born when she was thirty five. General Street, having retired from the Army at the age of sixty two just after his son's birth, died suddenly at the family home. After his father's death, Street and his mother went to live with his maternal grandparents at their house, Firlands, Woking, which was "comfortably staffed with seven domestics".^[5] Street "remained modestly circumspect" about his privileged background in later life, "familiarity with Street's life and writing" displaying his valuing of "a man's personal accomplishments over his family heritage."^[6]

Street was educated at Wellington College, Berkshire, then the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and was commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1903, subsequently transferring into the Special Reserves. Before the First World War, Street lived at Summerhill, a Regency country mansion outside Lyme Regis (later owned by A. S. Neill and run as a school, the name being subsequently used for his school at Leiston, Suffolk), where he was a shareholder in, and chief engineer for, the Lyme Regis Electric Light & Power Company, Ltd. He would later serve as a Captain in the Royal Garrison Artillery, was wounded three times and won the Military Cross. As a Major, he headed a branch of British Military Intelligence and later as an Information Officer at the Headquarters of the British Administration, based in Dublin Castle.^[7]

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