Miles Burton Views

• Books

He produced two long series of novels; one under the name of John Rhode featuring the forensic scientist Dr Priestley, and another under the name of Miles Burton featuring the investigator Desmond Merrion. Under the name Cecil Waye, Street produced four novels: The Figure of Eight; The End of the Chase; The Prime Minister's Pencil; and Murder at Monk's Barn. The Dr. Priestley novels were among the first after Sherlock Holmes to feature scientific detection of crime, such as analysing the mud on a suspect's shoes. Desmond Merrion is an amateur detective who works with Scotland Yard's Inspector Arnold.

For his part, John Street that year contributed two wartime detective novels with espionage elements, one a “John Rhode,d” They Watched by Night (Signal for Death), the other, the title under review here, a Miles Burton. While They Watched by Night is the better of the two tales, Death Visits Downspring makes an entertaining read. (I use the American title to distinguish the book from a 1949 John Rhode novel that in England also used the title Up the Garden Path!)

Miles Burton:’s novels often tend to be fairly cozy affairs, and Death Visits Downspring is no exception to this general rule. As usual, Street writes with authority about village life (

Rhode ’s Priestley looks more back to Freemanl’s Dr. Thorndyke. He was always a better known detective than Burtono’s Desmond Merrion, whom he preceded. After 1950, Miles Burton was dropped by American publishers, though all the Rhoden’s were published in the U.S. through the last, in 1961.

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