Proceed with Caution

Proceed with Caution is a 1937 detective novel by John Rhode, the pen name of the British writer Cecil Street. It is the twenty-seventh in his long-running series of novels featuring Lancelot Priestley, a Golden Age of [Detective Fiction|Golden Age] armchair detective. It was published in the United States the same year by Dodd Mead under the alternative title Body Unidentified.

Synopsis

Hanslet and Inspector Waghorn of Scotland Yard respectively investigate a diamond robbery and a suspicious death. A consignment of valuable jewels have gone missing while being transported from Hatton Garden. Meanwhile a corpse is found in a tar burner in a Kent village, completely unrecognisable. It takes the genius of Dr. Priestley to demonstrate how these two events are linked.

Literary significance

writing in The Guardian felt " If only Mr. Rhode were a little more careful with his characterisation, if only his literary style were a little less pedestrian, he would take an even higher place than that his persistent—and consistent—ingenuity has won for him."