''The Venner Crime'' is a 1933

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 s ...

John Rhode Cecil John Charles Street (3 May 1884 – 8 December 1964), who was known to his colleagues, family and friends as John Street, began his military career as an artillery officer in the British Army. During the course of World War I, he became a ...

, the pen name of the British writer Cecil Street. It is the sixteenth in his long-running series of novels featuring Lancelot Priestley, 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, Gold being the first and the one during which the G ...

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 armcha ...

. In Britain it was published by

Odhams Press Odhams Press was a British publishing company, operating from 1920 to 1968. Originally a magazine publisher, Odhams later expanded into book publishing and then children's comics. The company was acquired by Fleetway Publications in 1961 and the ...

, the only one of his works be done so, while in the United States it was handled by his usual publisher Dodd Mead. It has been described as a sort of sequel to his previous book '' The Claverton Mystery''.Evans p.247 Writing in the ''

New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' Isaac Anderson considered "This is not one of the best of the Dr. Priestley yarns, but it is plenty good enough to pass an idle evening."

Synopsis

An elderly man named Venner is poisoned by strychnine, but the case is at first mistaken as an accidental death. At almost exactly the same time his nephew Ernest disappears.

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. * Reilly, John M. ''Twentieth Century Crime & Mystery Writers''. Springer, 2015. 1933 British novels Novels by Cecil Street British crime novels British mystery novels British detective novels Odhams Press books Novels set in England {{1930s-crime-novel-stub