Forgotten Book - Documentary Evidence

Documentary Evidence seems to be one of the rarest of all Golden Age novels. Its author is Robertson Halkett - a pseudonym used twice by the prolific E.R. Punshon. But although Punshon's books aren't always hard to find, his Halkett novels are rare. Where Every Prospect Pleases, which I have written about before, is elusive enough, but not even the British Library has a copy of Documentary Evidence. Until recently, Tony Medawar was the only person I knew who had read it. Find a signed copy in a nice dustjacket, and you'll find yourself something really valuable. To say that it qualifies as a Forgotten Book is an under-statement!

But the revival of interest in Golden Age mysteries has changed the picture, and earlier this year, Ramble House published a nice new edition of the book, with an intro by Gavin O'Keefe. Gavin points out that this book appeared at much the same time as the first of the crime dossiers by Dennis Wheatley and Joe Links, and a couple of similarly structured books by Harry Stephen Keeler, once one of my father's favourites, and now extensively republished by Ramble House.

This story, as the title suggests, is told through a series of documents - letters, telegrams and so on - and I suspect that Punshon was paying homage to Dorothy L. Sayers, whose The Documents in the Case appeared six years earlier. Sayers' book is under-rated, in my opinion. It's no mean feat to write an intriguing and entertaining mystery in this way. What is especially unusual about Punshon's book is that it isn't a detective story but rather a thriller, as was the other Halkett novel.

So what did I make of the book, after years spent searching for it? Well, I'm delighted that Ramble House have satisfied my curiosity about it, but I can rather understand why Punshon abandoned the Halkett name afterwards, and concentrated on more conventional work. The story is about robbery and kidnapping, subjects which possibly don't lend themselves to the "document" format as well as a murder mystery, and for me, the best bits of the book are the jokes. There's an especially witty passage about the unlikely things that happen in real life. Not a masterpiece then, but an interesting structural experiment.

E.R. Punshon

Technology has its downsides, but one of its great benefits has been that technological advances in publishing have made it possible for a host of once obscure, and often unobtainable old books to become available again, at modest prices. Yes, the quality of those books is variable, but far better to read the occasional dud than not be able to check out the work of interesting writers. Recent months have seen a host of books, and indeed publishers, make their presence felt, and some of the authors concerned are certainly new names to me - an example is J.C. Lenehan, a minor Golden Age novelist whose work I have yet to sample.

E.R. Punshon is another to have benefited. I've talked about Punshon's books several times on this blog, as well as in The Golden Age of Murder, and I've mentioned his interest in social issues of his time, as well as the sometimes startling variability in quality of his work. He had a long writing career, though his hey-day was certainly in the Thirties, when Dorothy L. Sayers reviewed him very generously, and he was elected to membership of the Detection Club. I've even been lucky enough to find his Death of a Beauty Queen (one of his better books), with a splendid Detection Club-related inscription written in his rather spidery hand.

Fender Tucker's small press, Ramble House, has been publishing Punshon titles for a few years now, and Dictator's Way and Diabolic Candelabra are worth checking out. Their latest titles are both extremely interesting. Bobby Owen, Black Magic, Bloodshed and Burglary is a collection of short stories, which I look forward to reading. Punshon's recurrent weakness was verbosity (cunningly reflected in the book's title!), and the demands of the short story form no doubt provided a good discipline for him.

Documentary Evidence is an exceptionally rare "dossier" novel originally published under the name Robertson Halkett. And Six Were Present is the last of the Bobby Owen police stories, posthumously published in the Fifiies. All these books benefit from introductions by Gavin L. O'Keefe. I haven't mentioned Gavin before on this blog, but he is a talented chap - not only a researcher and writer but also an artist whose artwork adorns the covers of countless Ramble House books. There is a fun aspect to Ramble House's list (who else would publish the complete works of Harry Stephen Keeler?) that is extremely engaging.

I'm also a fan of Dean Street Press, masterminded by Rupert Heath, a well-known literary agent (several agents are moving into publishing, an interesting development that I'll talk about here one of these days.) DSP publish a wide range of books, including cricket books and detective stories by Tim Heald, a fine writer who unfortunately is not in the best of health just now. DSP have also done Golden Age enthusiasts proud, with an extensive series of reprints introduced by Curtis Evans, including plenty of Punshon titles, such as the excellent Information Received and Mystery of Mr Jessop.

I'll be discussing some of these Punshon books in more detail in due course, but in the meantime, I like to imagine how thrilled Punshon would have been in his later years, when he was still writing, but for a pretty small readership, to know that his books would enjoy a fresh life in the twenty-first century. For all technology's downsides, it gives us a great deal to delight in..  

Forgotten Book - Where Every Prospect Pleases

Where Every Prospect Pleases, first published in 1933, is one of just two books that E.R. Punshon published under the name Robertson Halkett, and although it is hard to find, it's a thriller with one or two touches that (as is often the case with Punshon's work) lift it out of the ordinariness suggested by the title. Punshon was a prolific writer, and probably wrote too much, but at his best he was pretty good.

Much of the action takes place in Monaco, although in the later stages, it shifts a few miles, to the south of France. At the start of the story, Philip Hargreaves is visiting the grave of his older brother John, an inventor who is believed by the authorities to have shot himself after running up debts in the casino. Philip, a young and rather naive fellow, is at least shrewd enough to realise that this is a case where all is not as it seems, and he shows a dogged determination to find out the truth.

Soon he finds himself embroiled in a mysterious sequence of events. Befriended by a Lancastrian called Briggs, he discovers clues in his late brother John's effects that lead him to suspect that a man called Summerville knows something about what happened to John. A strange encounter with a hostile waitress in a tea room and the curious behaviour of a fellow guest at the place where John stayed before his death are precursors to Philip's discovery that something very sinister is afoot in the stunning area between the Mediterranean and the mountains.

Punshon also indulges his taste for the macabre. We don't associate Golden Age  mysteries with scenes set in orgies where eager guests are treated to whipping shows, blue movies, and much more besides, but they are all elements of the criminal's design in this book, believe it or not, although in keeping with the times, this lurid material is handled decorously, This book isn't a masterpiece, but it's certainly readable, perhaps more so than some of Punshon's more conventional mysteries. I was lucky to track it down, and if you have similar fortune, I don't think this lively thriller will disappoint you. The name Halkett, incidentally, appealed to me so much that I borrowed it for a macabre story of my own, "Mr Halkett's Hobby".