A review of The Dusky Hour by E R Punshon
This is the ninth in Punshon’s Bobby Owen series, also known as Death in the Chalkpits, originally published in 1937 and reissued by Dean Street Press. The young Detective-Sergeant begins to come into his own, helped by the fact that the complexities of the case cause his Chief Constable, Colonel Warden, to have something akin to a nervous breakdown, allowing the young whippersnapper to resolve the case in his own inimitable way. As we come to expect with Punshon, there is a glorious set piece towards the end, when all the suspects slug it out and Owen reveals that he has skills which might win him a crown at the Police Boxing Championships.
What starts off as a simple enough incident – a man has been shot twice and his body is found in a car which has been pushed over into a chalk pit – turns into a complex tale of financial swindling, illustrating that there is no honour among thieves. The plot is more complex than some of Punshon’s featuring murder, share-pushing, where mugs are found to buy shares in worthless companies, card sharps, false identities, marriage proposals, American connections, and vendettas. The holy grail that a couple of gangs of criminals and members of the family who originally owned them are after are some bearer bonds worth a small fortune.
Punshon offers an interesting insight to a particular type of criminal who is prepared to play a long game, sowing the seeds of a plot, allowing it to mature, and then strike when the victim is hooked in. The rewards that such stings can generate, if the plot is successful, more than compensates for the long gestation period of the plan.
Each of the prime suspects, and there are a number of them, is keen to appear helpful to the authorities by explaining where they were and what they were doing around the critical point. Each seems to have a clear alibi and each of them, helpfully but to the growing despair of Colonel Warden, provides their own theory as to what happened and whom they believe the prime suspect to be. There is a section of the book where the investigators are passed form pillar to post. No wonder Warden gave up, leaving Owen with the freedom to pursue his own theories and cut the Gordian knot.
The alibis are some of the oddest that I have come across in Golden Age detective fiction, including a bull photographed in a certain field at a certain time, a hat which had only been delivered that day, and a cat spotted causing a traffic accident. The moral of the story is that if you are going to hand over evidence to the police, make sure that it suits your cause.
Once again, Punshon uses Owen to cast doubts upon the effectiveness of capital punishment and the young officer espouses the shocking thought that officers should have a warrant to search a property, something that many stories spawned by the genre cheerfully ignore but given especial emphasis when a chauffeur puts the police in their place when they arrive without the relevant piece of paper. This is symptomatic of Punshon’s socialist leanings which are allowed to peep through from time to time, especially when he pokes fun at Conservative views and prejudices.
In what is a complicated plot, perhaps overly so requiring a long explanation of how it all fits together at the end, Punshon manages to maintain pace and interest. The narrative has a rhythm of its own, his language less florid than in some of his earlier works, and the story builds up to a dramatic finale. I did spot the culprit but to Punshon’s credit he did make me wonder whether I was right at times.
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