Punshon, ER - Secrets Can't be Kept (1944)

B

One of the best of the Wychshire stories.  It’s slow moving (and Gollancz’s miniscule print doesn’t help), but Punshon creates a strong feeling of something dreadful, as ordinary people are suddenly revealed as strange and sinister.  It’s very much an atmospheric, character-driven story—Bobby talks to villagers and investigates relationships rather than using material clues.  The disappearance of a club-footed youth with a passion for finding out things leads to a tangle involving two disappearances (one of a presumed Nazi sympathiser, the other of a girl); stolen jewels; a water-colour which may be the most remarkable picture ever painted; and the horrifying spectacle of two women having tea.  The discovery of a body in a forest with ‘a smell of rotting, a smell of things decaying’ is very effective horror, like something out of M.R. James.  The murderer becomes certain once the body is found—and is slightly a let down, since he is  a jewel thief—but there’s an atmospheric interest other than in the detection.  The ending, in which the murderer perishes in flames, is excellent.

·        Physically misshapen characters: Ned Bloom; the vicar; crippled Skinner

·        Intense characters: Mrs. Bloom—‘Melpomene in an atmosphere of currant buns and special teas at one and nine’; Roman Wright in Ch. 21

·        Mr. Pyne’s double life as a music-hall performer—humorous version of criminal clergymen and philosophers in Cottage Murder, Bath Mysteries—self-parody

·        Missing man—body found in forest: Diabolic Candelabra

·        Lord & Lady Vennery (nouveau riche): Dickens’s Veneerings

Nick Fuller.