Punshon, ER - The Unexpected Legacy (1929)

E. R. Punshon was already an established author – predominantly of romances with occasional elements of the thriller – of almost thirty years standing when he published his first novel of detection in 1929. The Unexpected Legacy introduced his first series characters Inspector Carter and Sergeant Bell, two Scotland Yard detectives. They were an ill-matched pair in some respects - the former unimaginative, only concerned with career advancement and happy to take credit for someone else’s work and the latter gloomy, self effacing but occasionally displaying flashes of brilliance.

Their first case finds them investigating the death of a man found poisoned, shot and bludgeoned to death in circumstances that implicate a young clerk. This man has recently lost his job as a result of the dead man’s interference and being the hero of the piece, begins to act a hero should – falling in love with the beautiful heiress, implicating himself further by undertaking his own investigations and putting himself in mortal danger by swallowing a totally unconvincing story fed him by the real culprit.

Fortunately, Carter on Bell are on hand – though only the latter seems to do any detection – to save the credulous fool and apprehend the miscreant. The mystery, which like Connington’s Nemesis at Raynham Parva from the same year deals with the white slave trade, is hardly first class, but Punshon compensates with the quality of his writing. The interactions between the investigators are always appealing, his less than flattering descriptions of the hierarchy of Scotland Yard and its relationship with the press are interesting and he avoids the over-saccharined prose that can be a pitfall of the type of romance that was so popular in the early part of the century. Not a classic, but a creditable first effort from an author who is now shamefully neglected.

R E Faust

Review by Nick Fuller

2/5

My first Punshon, Punshon's first proper detective story: and not promising. Although the ambitious Carter (who impresses an Assistant Commissioner who made no "attempt to hide his own enormous and complete ignorance of life, of which indeed he knew no more outside his own little charmed circle than the cloistered nun knows of it outside hers") and the intelligent but gloomy Bell are both interesting characters, the story itself is very weak. The plot, which concerns the White Slave Trade and a victim who was murdered by three different people (bludgeoned, poisoned and shot), is as difficult to believe in as the tale of Bolshevists the obvious murderer tells the dolt of a hero, who, fearing that the police will suspect him if he comes to them with his deductions, refuses to tell them about the missing heiresses, and nearly gets himself poisoned. The gene pool would have profited.

By the way, would arsenic have taken effect so quickly?