The Ellerby Case

The Ellerby Case is a 1927 detective novel by John Rhode, the pen name of the British writer Cecil Street. It marked the third appearance of the armchair detective Lancelot Priestley, who featured in a long-running series of novels during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. The novel's success led to a contract with Dodd Mead to release it and subsequent novels in the United States, in what proved to be a lucrative arrangement for the author.The novel is particularly well known for a scene featuring an attempted murder using a hedgehog, with a review in the Evening Standard asking "could there possibly be a more ingenious method of committing a murder?".