'The hour of dusk was the climax in the strange case of the man found dead in the chalk pit. Who was the murdered man? And why did so many clues lead to that infamous London nightclub, the 'Cut and Come Again'?

E.R. Punshon leads the redoubtable Sergeant Bobby Owen and his readers on a dizzy chase through a maze of suspicions to a surprise ending - though the clues are there for anyone astute enough to interpret them.

The Dusky Hour is the ninth of E.R. Punshon's acclaimed Bobby Owen mysteries, first published in 1937 and part of a series which eventually spanned thirty-five novels.

"What is distinction? The few who achieve it step - plot or no plot - unquestioned into the first rank... in the works of Mr. E.R. Punshon we salute it every time." Dorothy L. Sayers

"Mr E.R. Punshon is one of the most entertaining and readable of our sensational novelists because his characters really live and are not merely pegs from which a mystery depends." Punch

Dorothy Scannell was born in the East End of London in 1911, one of ten children. At the age of 63, when she was already a grandmother, she wrote her first book Mother Knew Best, an evocative and entertaining memoir of her working-class childhood in east London between World Wars One and Two. The book's success prompted two further memoirs, Dolly's War and Dolly's Mixture, as well as a series of novels.

After marrying Chas, Dorothy had two children and two grand-children. She died, aged 96, in 2008.