There’s a Reason for Everything by E R Punshon is the third book I’ve read for Dean Street Press December, hosted by Liz at Adventures in Reading, Running and Working from Home. I’d never read anything by him before, or even heard of him, but it was one of the books Dean Street Press was giving away free in November 2021, so I was lucky to receive it. It’s the 21st in the Bobby Owen mystery series, first published in September 1945, and Bobby has recently been promoted from Inspector to Deputy Chief Constable of Wychshire.

The first thing to say is that I enjoyed it and the second thing is that it is a complicated novel with murders, a missing painting allegedly by Vermeer, dodgy fine art dealers and an abandoned country mansion, Nonpareil, once the home of the Tallebois family, and known as a haunted house.

Description from Amazon:

With a slow gesture of one lifted hand, Bobby pointed. There, in a space between the prostrate stag and posturing goddess, was a human leg, a twisted, motionless leg in a strained, unnatural position.

Bobby Owen, now Deputy Chief Constable of Wychshire, finds himself taking part in a ghost hunt at legendary haunted mansion Nonpareil. What he discovers is the very real corpse of a paranormal investigator. It seems that among the phantoms there are fakes – but will that end up including a priceless painting by Vermeer?

Nonpareil, where much of the action tales place, dominates the book. It is enormous, with many rooms, now boarded up and in darkness, connected by a

far-stretching labyrinth of corridors and of rooms, room upon room, one opening from another, all in gloom alleviated by the spare daylight that here and there struggled through chinks and cracks in the boarded windows. (page 83)

The silence is intense in the all-pervading gloom, with great shadows where a man could lurk unseen and in its east and west wings space enough to hide an army. The picture gallery, a long, lofty, narrow room, with windows on one side and niches between the windows where shrouded statues stand, is darker even than anywhere else in the house. A sense of danger, spookiness and foreboding pervades the book and it has a great sense of place.

The characters are just as mysterious, apart from the police, of course. Are they who they say they are? I was perplexed for quite some time until I began to see what was behind the bewildering confusion in Punshon’s narrative. I think this is a cleverly constructed plot, with ingenious puzzles to piece together before all the answers are revealed. I was quite pleased to find out at the end that I’d worked out one of the clues correctly.

I’ll certainly look for more of Punshon’s books to read. There are 35 Bobby Owen mysteries, 1 Inspector Carter mystery and 4 novels.

About the author from Dean Street Press:

E.R. Punshon was born in London in 1872.

At the age of fourteen he started life in an office. His employers soon informed him that he would never make a really satisfactory clerk, and he, agreeing, spent the next few years wandering about Canada and the United States, endeavouring without great success to earn a living in any occupation that offered. Returning home by way of working a passage on a cattle boat, he began to write. He contributed to many magazines and periodicals, wrote plays, and published nearly fifty novels, among which his detective stories proved the most popular and enduring.

He died in 1956.