The Dusky Hour

The hour of dusk was the climax in the strange case of the man found dead in the chalk pit. Who was the murdered man? And why did so many clues lead to that infamous London nightclub, the ‘Cut and Come Again'?

E.R. Punshon leads the redoubtable Sergeant Bobby Owen and his readers on a dizzy chase through a maze of suspicions to a surprise ending – though the clues are there for anyone astute enough to interpret them.

The Dusky Hour
is the ninth of E.R. Punshon's acclaimed Bobby Owen mysteries, first published in 1937 and part of a series which eventually spanned thirty-five novels.

E. R. Punshon's suspenseful and engrossing ninth Bobby Owen detective novel,
The Dusky Hour
, was not well-received by the Bible of stout detective fiction orthodoxy, originally published over forty years ago but still turned to today for instruction by traditionalist mystery fans: Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor's
A Catalogue of Crime
. In its general dismissal of
The Dusky Hour
, Barzun and Taylor's
Catalogue
even condemns the “adolescent name” of Punshon's series sleuth, Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen. Evidently in the opinion of the august co-authors of the
Catalogue
, a mystery writer's investigator was not allowed something so vulgar as a diminutive cognomen, even one that, in the case of Punshon's Bobby Owen, calls to mind actual British slang for a cop. Yet despite this later carping from the
Catalogue
, during his lifetime Punshon was a great favorite of two Golden Age stalwarts of Great Britain's Detection Club, the renowned Dorothy L. Sayers and Sayers' esteemed successor as
Sunday Times
crime fiction reviewer, Milward Kennedy. (Punshon became a member of the Detection Club in 1933, three years after the formation of the prestigious social organization, of which Sayers and Kennedy were, along with other notable mystery writers like Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley and Freeman Will Crofts, co-founders.) Sayers's rave review of Punshon's debut Bobby Owen mystery,
Information Received
(1933), gave a great lift-off to the Bobby Owen series (see my introduction to that novel), while Kennedy declared explicitly of
The Dusky Hour
, “I do not think that Mr. Punshon, another front-rank man, has ever done better work than this.”

Why the divergence between these two pairs of generally discerning critics, Barzun and Taylor, Sayers and Kennedy? Surely it arose from their differing aesthetic views. Looking back at the Golden Age of detective fiction from the vantage point of the 1970s, the pining traditionalists Barzun and Taylor no doubt would have preferred from
The Dusky Hour
a more strictly functional narrative, along the lines of, say, a mystery by Christie or Crofts.
The Dusky Hour
, on the other hand, is a fairly long book for its period, and Punshon's narrative style is expansive, his sentences sometimes structurally rambunctious. In the midst of the 1930s, however, both Sayers and Kennedy had enthusiastically embraced the ascending movement within the mystery genre to merge the puzzle-oriented detective story with the mainstream, literary novel, making it more emotionally compelling and psychologically credible; and they deemed Punshon an important player in this bold artistic advance, an author to be celebrated, not castigated, for his narrative flourishes. 

To be sure, Milward Kennedy commended the plot of
The Dusky Hour
, which concerns the discovery of a dead body in a car dumped into a Berkshire chalk pit (in a case of life imitating art, the novel preceded by nine years England's notorious real-life chalk pit murder, committed in the neighboring county of Surrey by the infamous Thomas Ley) and the net of suspicion that tightens around the inhabitants of three nearby country houses, including Sevens, the hideous “sham and inappropriate” Victorian Gothic residence of the local squire, Mr. Moffatt, and his young adult children, Ena and Noll. Also implicated in the affair are some Americans with agendas and denizens of the Cut and Come Again, a dubious arty West End nightclub, introduced by Punshon in his immediately preceding detective novel,
Mystery of Mr. Jessop
(1937). In my own view, the mystery plot of
The Dusky Hour
, which culminates in a final chapter with sixteen pages of elucidation, is of a complexity that ought to please the most exacting of puzzle fans. Whenever I read the novel, I invariably find myself admiring how Bobby, already at the beginning of the story called to the scene by the county constabulary because they believe an emissary from Scotland Yard may be able to identify the murdered man, fits all the author's intricately cut puzzle pieces together. Yet Milward Kennedy also praised--again most astutely, I believe--the “sharply and economically” drawn characters in
The Dusky Hour
, as well as the novel's writing, pronouncing it “irreproachable in style” and “spiced by the author's wide reading and acute observation.”

There indeed are nicely individuated characters and pleasingly unorthodox authorial asides that enhance this fine crime tale. For example, Punshon on several occasions wryly mocks the High Tory, agrarian conservatism of Mr. Moffatt, as in the following passage, which makes mention of a prominent, real-life English newspaper with a left-leaning, working-class readership: “Mr. Moffatt nodded. He knew Norris well enough, the constable stationed at the village, a civil, intelligent fellow, though less active against poaching than one could have wished, and reported, though one hoped untruly, to have been seen reading the
Daily Herald
--a bad sign.” Yet again, a Punshon mystery confounds long-prevalent conventional wisdom that the Golden Age English detective novel invariably expressed instinctive longing for the more securely fixed social structures of the Victorian and Edwardian eras.

  Through the perspective of the liberal-minded Bobby Owen, the author also indicates doubts about the efficacy of both capital punishment and harsh police interrogation (“It was [Bobby's] experience that one thing told willingly was worth half a dozen resulting from what are called ‘third degree' methods”); and he recognizes that English police actually do need to concern themselves, as a matter of law, with obtaining search warrants before conducting a search--surely something that would have come as news to the police characters of Freeman Wills Crofts, whose implacable popular series crime buster, Inspector Joseph French, armed with his startling array of razor blades, bent wires and skeleton keys, routinely flouts English law on this subject with cheerful abandon. In
The Dusky Hour
I for my part was positively thrilled when a character--a chauffeur no less--evicts the police from his abode after they admit to him that they have no warrant to search it.

On this matter I say three cheers for the people! And three cheers as well for Mr. Punshon and his Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen--a likable, young British cop who once again cleverly cracks a most complex case, adolescent name or not.

Curtis Evans

The little man with the round red smiling face, the soft alluring voice, the ingenuous eyes, sipped with keen appreciation his glass of port, vintage, Dow, 1904; a sound drink.

“Yes,” he was saying meditatively, “I sold him those Woolworth shares for £20. He wasn't keen; thought they were speculative; talked about preferring something sounder. But he took them all right. Now he's drawing £20,000 a year from them. Not so bad, eh?” The speaker paused and gave a faint chuckle. “I won't deny,” he said, “that if I had had the least idea how that deal was going to turn out, I mightn't have broken my first rule, even though it's to that I owe what success in business has come my way.”

“What rule is that?” asked his host, Mr. Moffatt, a big, heavy-looking man with a general air of liking to do himself well and at the same time of trying to keep himself in condition by plenty of open-air exercise.

The other sipped his port again. His name was Pegley – Edward George Pegley, generally known as “Peg” or “Ted,” for he was a genial soul and hated all formality. He spoke with a faint American accent. Born in a London suburb, he had spent a good many years in Denver, Colorado.

“My first rule,” he explained seriously, “and I've never broken it yet, is that if I know a good thing, I offer it to my clients first. My first duty, I consider, is their interest. In that respect I rank myself with a lawyer, a doctor. The client comes first. Professional duty. Only if my clients pass it do I consider it for myself. Even then –” He shrugged his shoulders. “Lack of capital, and then again – not my business. I'm not an investor. I'm an adviser of investors. If my clients got the idea that I was nosing round for good things for myself, my standing would be gone.” He paused, grinned, winked. “But I own up,” he said, “if I had dreamed that that £20 – good thing though I knew it to be – was going to turn into a steady £20,000 a year, I should have advised it all the same, but when my client turned it down at first, perhaps I shouldn't have gone on pressing it quite so strongly. All the same, I do feel a bit pleased I can say my rule stands unbroken. I don't, for instance, own a single share in Cats Cigarettes, though I've advised three or four clients to make investments in Cats that bring them in at least a hundred per cent – more, when they bought early. I remember one man – a bank manager – was so impressed by what I told him that he went home, mortgaged his house, furniture, insurance policy – raised fifteen hundred, I think it was – sank the whole lot in Cats Ordinary. I was a bit taken aback myself; more than I had bargained for. His wife was furious; thought he was mad; wept, hysterics, threatened to leave him, sent me a letter from her lawyer threatening I don't quite know what. Then he died. Wife thought she was ruined. Talked about learning typing and shorthand.

“Now she draws a steady £3,000 a year from that investment, lives in a swell West End flat, learns contract bridge instead of shorthand and typing. I must say she sends me a case of whisky every Christmas and that's more than some clients do, no matter how much they've profited. Of course, I've had my fee, so that's all right.”

“It sounds like a fairy-tale,” said Mr. Moffatt, listening greedily, his eyes alight, his port forgotten – unprecedentedly.

There was a third man present, sitting opposite Mr. Pegley. He was tall, thin, active-looking, with a small head on broad shoulders and a large imposing Roman nose above the tiny moustache and the small pointed imperial that in these days of shaven chins helped to give him his distinctive and even distinguished appearance. His long, loose limbs ended in enormous hands and feet, and on one hand shone a valuable-looking diamond ring, a solitary stone set in platinum. He seemed between forty and fifty years of age, and at the back of his head was beginning to show a bald patch that he admitted smilingly worried him a little, so that, in an endeavour to cure it, he had taken to going about without a hat. He had a habit of silence that added weight to his words when he spoke; grey, keen eyes; an aloof, imperturbable, slightly disdainful manner; and, when he chose to produce it, a most charming, winning smile that seemed to show a store of geniality and friendliness behind his somewhat formal air. His name was Larson – Leopold Leonard Larson. He was in business in the City, and, though he had listened to Mr. Pegley's monologue in his habitual silence, he had stirred once or twice uneasily in his chair. He was spending the week-end at Sevens, Mr. Moffatt's place near the Berkshire boundary, and Mr. Pegley had not seemed best pleased to find him there when he himself arrived from London to dine and talk business. He was watching Mr. Larson now with eyes that had grown alert and wary as he went on chatting.

“More than I can understand,” he said, “especially after living so long in the States, the way people on this side leave their money as good as dead. An American would think himself crazy if he kept half his capital on deposit account or tied up in the good old two and a half consols that may have been all right in our fathers' time, when land was land and brought in a decent return, and all a country gentleman needed was a trifle of ready cash coming in twice a year to meet any delay in the payment of the rents, or any extra estate expense – a new row of cottages, a new wing to the house, or what not. But to keep good money tied up like that to-day – why, it's like a farmer keeping his seed corn in the barn instead of sowing it in the field. Safe in the barn, no doubt, but where's next year's harvest?”