Punshon, ER - Death Among the Sunbathers (1934)

Review by Nick Fuller

2/5

Rather a poor offering from this gifted author. Although it begins well as an entertaining detective story with plenty of suspects and an unusual setting, it shifts slightly more than halfway through into the dreadful realm of thrillerdom, with the nudist colony revealed to be but a front for a clever gang of arsonists, whose leader hides his pistol in a box of crank's food. Bobby Owen spends the whole book in a preposterous (and obvious) disguise, as insulting to him as it is to the reader.

From the evidence of this book and others of its ilk, one can only conclude that nudist camps do not agree with the detective story. Printer's Error was Gladys Mitchell's weakest effort of the 1930s, and the less said about Ellery Queen's Egyptian Cross Mystery, the better.