Information Received by E.R. Punshon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
The opening sentence of “Information Received” is a whole 10-line paragraph. Each chapter has a title, with a pretty lines-&-leaves archway above it. Welcome back to literature before Hemingway & Hurston, when English (like Greek) comprised separate written & spoken forms. In its prose, in its lofty country-house & Lincoln’s Inn settings, in the distinguished personages who inhabit them, & even in the feudal friction between ranks in the police force, “Information Received” is as vivid a showcase for the British class system as “Downton Abbey.”
Unwrapping the layers of E. R. Punshon’s prose to find his plot (and quite an intricate and fast-moving plot it is) can feel like forking through the filo in a spanakopita. What 21st-century publisher could resist red-penciling this first sentence of Chapter VIII, The Heiress?:
“Not without a certain emotion, for it seemed to them both it might be the solution of the mystery that was approaching them. the veteran Superintendent, the youthful constable, watched as Peter came quickly across the hall.”
As with a good spanakopita, though, flavor triumphs over form. This is, after all, 1934. Though the characters are all white & mostly male, they’re distinctive & interesting, & there’s plenty of dialogue — informal spoken English — to keep them (& the reader) zipping along. Halfway through the book we even have a sort of car chase, at the breathtaking speed of 40 mph. From the first hint of mystery on p. 1, when Sir Charles Clarke’s lawyer baffles him by delivering a stranger’s gift of 2 theatre tickets, we careen through a suspenseful classic-English landscape of fraud & embezzlement, romance & betrayal, burglary & murder.
I enjoyed “Information Received” enough to devour it in one sitting. I’m not sure it would have been as much fun to step in & out of Punshon’s world & re-acclimate all over again. And although I’m curious to see what Constable Bobby Owen & Superintendent Mitchell get up to next, I doubt I’ll seek out the rest of the series: as with Downton Abbey & Harry Potter, one thrilling episode is probably enough.
