''Blackthorn House'' is a 1949

detective novel Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective—whether professional, amateur or retired—investigates a crime, often murder. The detective genre began around the same time as specu ...

John Rhode Cecil John Charles Street (3 May 1884 – 8 December 1964), also known as John Street, was a Major (rank), major in the British Army and a crime fiction novelist. He began his military career as an artillery officer and during World War I, he ...

, the

pen name A pen name or nom-de-plume is a pseudonym (or, in some cases, a variant form of a real name) adopted by an author and printed on the title page or by-line of their works in place of their real name. A pen name may be used to make the author's na ...

of the British writer Cecil Street. It is the forty eighth in his long-running series of novels featuring

Lancelot Priestley Dr. Lancelot Priestley is a fictional investigator in a series of books by John Rhode. After 1924, Dr. Priestley took over from Dr. Thorndyke as the leading fictional forensic investigator in Britain and featured in 72 novels written over 40 y ...

, a

Golden Age The term Golden Age comes from Greek mythology, particularly the ''Works and Days'' of Hesiod, and is part of the description of temporal decline of the state of peoples through five Ages of Man, Ages, Gold being the first and the one during wh ...

armchair detective An armchair detective is a fictional investigator who does not personally visit a crime scene or interview witnesses; instead, the detective either reads the story of the crime in a newspaper or has it recounted by another person. As the armch ...

.Reilly p.1257

Synopsis

A man finds that the car he has recently bought is stolen property. Even more alarmingly there is a corpse with a body concealed in it, that links to the country mansion Blackthorn House.

References

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. * Herbert, Rosemary. ''Whodunit?: A Who's Who in Crime & Mystery Writing''. Oxford University Press, 2003. * Magill, Frank Northen . ''Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction: Authors, Volume 4''. Salem Press, 1988. * Reilly, John M. ''Twentieth Century Crime & Mystery Writers''. Springer, 2015. 1949 British novels Novels by Cecil Street British crime novels British mystery novels British detective novels Geoffrey Bles books Novels set in England {{1940s-crime-novel-stub