Death at the Dance

Death at the Dance is a 1952 mystery detective novel by John Rhode, the pen name of the British writer Cecil Street. It is the fifty fourth in his long-running series of novels featuring Lancelot Priestley, a Golden Age armchair detective. It was published in America the same year by Dodd Mead. It is set in a county in the West of England, a thinly-disguised Cornwall. Maurice Richardson wrote in The Observer "Not even the corniest of plots can make Rhode unreadable". More recently it has been described as offering a "clever plot with, unusual for Street, a hard-to-spot murderer and motive, as well as an appealing rural setting: a mysterious Hardyesque landscape of abandoned nineteenth century tin mines.