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Book Review: MURDER ABROAD (1939) by E.R. Punshon

6/19/2022

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In Murder Abroad, E.R. Punshon’s enjoyable thirteenth mystery in his series featuring Bobby Owen, the career policeman investigates the suspicious death of an Englishwoman among the hilly terrain of France’s Massif Central region. An older woman with an affinity for painting, Miss Polthwaite had been living in a converted mill in the quiet village of Citry-sur-l’eau. She was also rumored to have brought along a collection of uncut diamonds, and after a brief disappearance her body is discovered at the bottom of a well.

With little authority and not overly optimistic, Bobby arrives to find the mill already inhabited by an unfriendly English couple named Williams. But the prime suspect is a young man named Charles Camion, who had a row with Miss Polthwaite the night she went missing. Talking with the villagers adds some details to the picture: the murdered woman appeared to be afraid of someone or something; there was bad blood between Camion and a boxing hopeful named Volny, who might have been competing for Miss Polthwaite’s favor and finances; and a few of the rough diamonds have shown up at the base of the shrine to the Black Virgin, despite the curé’s efforts to conceal the fact from Bobby.

As the traveling detective states it at the end of the first chapter, Owen’s mission is threefold: “the diamonds, the murderer, the truth.” If he can uncover one or more, the same Lady Markham who pulled strings to get him a month’s leave from the force will advance Bobby to a private secretaryship for a chief constable. (One neat detail about Punshon’s series is that Bobby rises in the ranks as his successes and hard work are rewarded through promotions. He is introduced as a rookie Police-Constable in 1933’s inaugural Information Received; eleven adventures later, Owen is now a Detective-Sergeant building up enough career security so he can wed his hat-maker love interest, Olive Farrar.) The fact that Owen is a visitor in France and that his English policeman’s status means nothing offers an interesting twist. As he remarks midway through the mystery, ordinarily he would report his findings to his superior and let those above him decide how best to activate the investigative machine and take the next steps. Alone on the hills and plateaus of Auvergne Bobby can’t rely on a group decision, and each action must be taken by him as a free – and often vulnerable – agent and outsider.

E.R. Punshon’s stories can sometimes feel overwritten and underpaced, resulting in tedium when readers find themselves ahead of the author and his detective. But Murder Abroad delivers one of Punshon’s best tales. It is not so much because the crime puzzle baffles, although the scenario of a spinster thrown into a well generates a haunting sense of the harshness of nature enhanced by the rocky, rough Massif setting. For me, it is largely the lack of divisional police trappings that makes the investigation here more immediate and intriguing than in previous stories such as The Mystery of Mr. Jessop (1937). By Chapter Two, Bobby is in the village and flying solo, and so there are no over-the-desk office conversations with a Superintendent Mitchell type to summarize points and decide what “bears looking into.” Punshon gives his detective a Watson of sorts in the form of Père Trouché, a pontificating blind beggar whose pride and acute sense of hearing help Bobby make connections among the villagers he might otherwise have missed.

I found the stranger-in-a-strange-land aspect of Murder Abroad very effective. While the book’s prose and dialogue are presented almost exclusively in English, we are offered enough evidence of idioms and translations to be reminded that Bobby Owen is conversing in the natives’ language. (One example: the English policeman uses the word assassin when referring to Miss Polthwaite’s unknown killer, a term reflective of the French word for murdered, assassiné.)  Bobby himself feels out of place and unfamiliar with the local customs and social psychology of these people. “At home,” writes Punshon, “in England, in London especially, [Bobby] would have been able to place them all much more easily and to form on them a judgment much more likely to be accurate.” 

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Despite – or perhaps because of – Bobby’s status as an alien, the suspects in this story are delineated well and engagingly drawn, and there is a first-chapter clue to the murderer’s identity hiding in plain sight for those with sharp eyes. The book’s climax is genuinely suspenseful, as the discovery of a second body sends Bobby and the blind man into the hills as night descends, where they have a fateful confrontation with an armed killer.

The excellent Dean Street Press has returned to print and eBook E.R. Punshon’s elusive mysteries, so fans of classic mystery fiction can access them affordably once more (or discover them for the first time).  The Goodreads group Reading the Detectives is currently moving through the Bobby Owen series, and this month’s selection coincided with my own Punshon progress, as I had read up to Murder Abroad. I’m glad I made the journey. And this Detective-Sergeant seems to be going places. 

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Book Review: DEATH OF A BEAUTY QUEEN (1935) by E.R. Punshon

12/27/2020

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Back in the late 1990’s, when discovering authors and book series from the Golden Age of Detection blossomed from a flirtation to an obsession, I first became acquainted with British writer E.R. Punshon and his earnest young career policeman protagonist, Bobby Owen. Tackling them in chronological order over the years, I found the books enjoyable but never singularly remarkable. The result was that, after each read, it took me successively longer to return to the shelf for the next series title, and after the twelfth published Bobby Owen adventure, 1939’s Suspects – Nine, I quietly moved on to other authors and other detectives.

And yet the hiatus isn’t altogether fair to Punshon, a consistent and decently engaging writer whose textual tone Mike Grost describes as “a cross between the Scotland Yard heroes of the Crofts school and the sort of gentlemanly figures found in writers like Christie, Allingham, and Marsh.” In addition, Punshon takes his duty to deliver a fair-play puzzle seriously, and while he sometimes allows his reader to get ahead of the solution, there is craft and wit on display in much of his writing and plotting (at least among the dozen that I have read so far). The Goodreads group Reading the Detectives is currently working through the Bobby Owen series, and I thought this would provide a good excuse to go back to that unjustly neglected bookshelf and revisit a Punshon production.

This month the group has chosen Death of a Beauty Queen from 1935, the fifth in an impressive series of 35 Owen books. The premise is immediate and absorbing: manipulative beauty contestant Carrie Mears is found in a manager’s office during a pageant, dying from a stab wound to the throat. The competitor she has tricked into performing poorly – and whose fingerprint is found on a knife – becomes one suspect, while a puritanical city councilor trying to remove his lovestruck son from the premises become two more. The victim’s fiancé arrives soon thereafter on a motorbike, while the stage manager reports that a stranger asking for Carrie but denied entry may have snuck past him in the chaos of ebbing and flowing visitors.

It is true that Sergeant Bobby Owen arrives with energy at the crime scene, but Beauty Queen’s investigation is conducted by Superintendent Mitchell of Scotland Yard. The latter is a very capable figure of authority, and one of my first surprises upon rereading was realizing that the author’s series detective will be more of an observer than a participant in this story. The role change does not diminish the telling at all, as Owen intellectually tries to assess the clues and testimony to solve the case, and the reader is given access to his thoughts and surmises.

Another surprise was being reminded of the novelistic, almost melodramatic approach that Punshon uses, one that often lingers on details and vivid descriptive moments for mood and characterization. It’s another element that connects Punshon with similar detective fiction mood-setters, evocative authors like Gladys Mitchell and John Dickson Carr. I particularly enjoyed the time taken to set the scene from character perspectives, first from the attention-seeking victim-to-be as she soaks in the adoration on the stage and spontaneously sabotages another participant, and then in the next chapter from the harried cinema manager Mr. Sargent, who regrets offering to stage the pageant in the first place.

As admirable (and, for me, as welcome) as such literary flourishes to expose character psychology might be, Punshon’s prose also runs the danger of being excessive and overheated. I think this is why I need to sample this author in moderation; an oppressively rendered atmosphere can sometimes arrest a scene’s energy. In Beauty Queen, for example, we have the very Gothic image of a pious man (the Puritanical councilor) whose hair turns white and who seems to age overnight due to a heavy burden weighing upon his soul:

For a moment or two, Bobby felt too bewildered to speak, nor could he keep his eyes from the brick Paul Irwin had been holding, or his mind from questioning what use it had been meant to serve. Unutterably changed, also, did the old man seem, as if he had passed, in these last few days, from a hale and sound maturity to an extreme old age. And yet, in spite of his bowed form and silvery hair, there was a still a smouldering fire in his eye that seemed as if it yet had power to turn to momentary flame; there was still a hint of power in his bearing, as though all was not yet decay.
The transformation is a striking detail, to be sure, and it lends the genre story a larger sense of tragedy, something out of Hardy or Hawthorne. But it’s also ultimately a descriptive detail and not truly a clue that gets reader and detective closer to divining a solution. (In contrast, think of what Agatha Christie might do with a character whose appearance and hair color have changed. She likely would not leave it at a literary metaphor, as readers would expect it to be integrated into the mystery plot.)

There are a handful of colorful clues in Beauty Queen, even as many of them prove to be red herrings. Among them, though, is a potential clue so obvious in its introduction by the author that I was astounded it was not activated or commented upon by the eagle-eyed Bobby Owen! There is so much discussion of the murderer likely having blood on their clothes as a result of a stab to the throat in close proximity, and then the fiancé shows up in Chapter Six with his overcoat covered in mud from a fall from his motorcycle… And yet the highly suspicious garment is never referred to again, either by the author or his detective, nor does it function as a clue genuine or false, except to bewilder or frustrate a reader.

Punshon’s sentences can sometimes run on, as evidenced in the quotation above. But it is helpful to remember that the author actually started his crime story career in 1907, when Victorian-era storytelling defined both pacing and description on the page. So while E.R. Punshon’s writing has been compared with a half dozen Golden Age-era mystery writers already in this review, his work also aligns with the sometimes overdescriptive output of Eden Phillpotts or Anna Katherine Green, and also seems influenced by Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. Good company, to be sure, but the contemporary Punshon reader needs to recognize and be responsive to the denser style. I like the extra flourishes, but find they need to be taken in moderation.

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Interestingly, the author had already turned 60 years old when he introduced his young policeman in 1933’s Information Received, so the appearance of artifacts from a previous literary era should not be wholly surprising here. Dean Street Press has returned all of the Bobby Owen books to print and has issued eBook editions, and that is cause for celebration. Some of the titles could not be found in their first editions for love or money, and they are worth discovering and reading for any fan interested in between-the-wars mysteries with a Victorian era flavor.

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Book Review: BOBBY OWEN, BLACK MAGIC, BLOODSHED, AND BURGLARY (2015) by E.R. Punshon

7/7/2019

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Several years ago, when I was nearly finished with providing summaries and reviews for all of Gladys Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley books at The Stone House, I flirted with the idea of creating a second tribute website spotlighting another overlooked GAD-era mystery writer. Back in the early 2000's, some writers (like Mitchell) were underrepresented on the Internet, and very little information beyond title lists and brief author biographies were available to curious readers. I had already read the first three books in E.R. Punshon's series featuring policeman Bobby Owen, and felt like he would be a worthy candidate for early Internet-era canonization.

And he would have been, except for one thing: I found that Punshon's books were always enjoyable and moderately engaging but not really notable or especially commendable. His detective fiction straddled a strange space on the strengths-and-weaknesses spectrum that brought them close to a neutral score whenever I finished one. And that's odd, because my experience with E.R. Punshon and Owen has always been positive, yet I never rush to start the next installment. So while to date I've read the first 12 titles in the 34-book Owen series in chronological order, it has taken me 17 years to do so.

Punshon's strengths include inventing imaginative mystery scenarios and effectively conjuring mood and setting in his stories. His proletariat policeman Bobby Owen, who rises in the ranks over the course of the series owing to his keen intelligence and quick actions, is a very likable figure, modest and earnest but also perceptive and intuitive in a winning way. (I haven't read any books in his earlier Carter & Bell series.) Even with these positive attributes, though, Punshon's prose can feel uninspired and repetitive, and his pacing is sometimes very slow, allowing the reader to get ahead of his plotlines.

I was curious to try a collection of his short stories published in 2015 by the great independent publisher Ramble House, Bobby Owen, Black Magic, Bloodshed, and Burglary. I'm very glad I did, because problems with pacing and prose disappear when the author shifts his focus from novels to short tales. There is a welcome mix of crime stories – five of them feature Owen, while the others allow the story to unfold from the criminal's or intended victim's point of view – and a handful of very entertaining weird tales exploring supernatural and spooky phenomena and the unlucky people whose lives change (or end) when they become entwined.

Experiencing these short pieces one after another, I was impressed with the creative variety of storylines on display, and with the attention Punshon pays to crafting a solid story in whichever genre he is practicing. Several of the collected stories were published in periodicals like The Strand Magazine and The Weekly Tale-Teller in the first decades of the 20th century, when both crime-themed tales and eerie ghost stories were in a sort of pre-pulp popular demand. (Thank you to Ramble House and editor Gavin O'Keefe for locating and assembling the unjustly neglected works.) The shorter format also shows Punshon's ability to be nimble and spare, whittling a story down to its essentials while still using enough description and scene-setting to ignite the reader's imagination.

All five Bobby Owen stories collected here were originally published in The Evening Standard, and they are uniformly good if not especially memorable. The horror stories in the following group fare better, and Punshon clearly knows how to use the genre elements to strong effect. While none of these stories breaks new thematic ground, the best of them are eerie, imaginative tales. The early "Little Red Devil", first published in 1904, shows the Faustian price to be paid for a writer driven to create horrible, transformational art; "The Living Stone" from 1939 would feel right at home in a Clive Barker anthology decades later, while stories like "The Long Lane" (1898) and "From Beyond the Barrier" (1911) recall the straightforward yet unsettling supernatural narratives of M.R. James.

The anthology also includes seven pieces collected as crime stories, and they vary in approach and tone. Liberated from the limitation to tell tales just from the policeman's perspective (as with the Bobby Owen shorts), these are fun, mischievous little stories of larceny and murder. "My Day of Vengeance" (1906) channels Poe's immortal "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843) – indeed, it is the story of a murderer who must unexpectedly battle his conscience and keep hold of his sanity – and "The Miracle Worker" (1919), about a suburban couple falling for a charlatan of a spiritual medium, has the DNA of O. Henry in its blood.

PictureE.R. Punshon, author photo from the 1950 Penguin paperback reprint edition of Mystery Villa.
My favorite tale, however, is "Lady Betty and the Burglars". First published in 1917, it is a lively early example (certainly running against crime story stereotypes of its time) of the notion that a woman is able to confront dangers and solve problems on her own, emphatically without the need of a man to come to her rescue. It's a droll effort, and still surprising and fresh more than a century later.

The collection Bobby Owen, Black Magic, Bloodshed, and Burglary is an impressive testament to E.R. Punshon's care for crafting storylines, evoking mood, and telling a variety of tales. I am grateful that his work has been anthologized to avoid losing these stories to time, neglect, and indifference, which would be a shame. While I never got around to honoring E.R. Punshon with his own website, I am very happy to champion his writing in this review!


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