The Murders in Praed Street

The Murders in Praed Street is a 1928 detective novel by John Rhode, the pen name of the British writer Cecil Street. It features the fourth appearance of the armchair detective Lancelot Priestley, who figured in a long-running series of novels during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.



In 1936 it was adapted into the film Twelve Good Men, produced by the British subsidiary of Warner Brothers at Teddington Studios. Directed by Ralph Ince, it starred Henry Kendall, Nancy O'Neil, and Joyce Kennedy. It is the only one of the author's novels to be filmed.



Street was born in Gibraltar to General John Alfred Street CB of Woking, and his second wife, Caroline, daughter of Charles Horsfall Bill of Storthes Hall, Yorkshire, head of a landed gentry family. Caroline had married comparatively late and her only son was born when she was thirty-five. General Street, having retired from the Army at the age of sixty-two just after his son's birth, died suddenly. Consequently, Street and his mother lived with his maternal grandparents at their house in Firlands, Woking, which was "comfortably staffed with seven domestics.". Street remained "modestly circumspect" about his privileged background in later life and valued "a man's personal accomplishments over his family heritage".