Sometime in the 1950s an increasingly fragile Punshon took a dreadful tumble down the landing steps at the Detection Club premises at Kingly Street, an event Christianna Brand vividly recollected many years later in 1979, with what seems rather callous amusement on her part:
My last memory, or the most abiding one, of the club room in the clergy house, was of an evening when two members were initiated there instead of at the annual dinner [possibly Glyn Carr and Roy Vickers, 1955 initiates]. As they left, they stepped over the body of an elderly gentleman lying with his head in a pool of blood, just outside the door . . . dear old Mr. Punshon, E.R. Punshon, tottering up the stone stair steps upon his private business, had fallen all the way down again and severely lacerated his scalp. My [physician] husband, groaning, dealt with all but the gore, which remained in a slowly congealing pool upon the clergy house floor. . . . However, Miss Sayers had, predictably, just the right guest for such an event, a small, brisk lady, delighted to cope. She came out on the landing and stood for a moment peering down at the unlovely mess. Not myself one to delight in hospital matters, I hovered ineffectively as much as possible in the rear. She made up her mind. “Well, I think we can manage that all right. Can you find me a tablespoon?”
The club room was unaccountably lacking in tablespoons. I went out and diffidently offered a large fork. “A fork? Oh, well . . .” She bent again and studied the pool of gore. “I think we can manage,” she said again, cheerfully. “It’s splendidly clotted.”
I returned once more to the club room and closed the door; and I can only report that when it opened again, not a sign remained of any blood, anywhere. “I thought,” said my husband as we took our departure before even worse might befall, “that in your oath you foreswore vampires.” “She was only a guest,” I said apologetically.
“Dear old Mr. Punshon,” no vampire he, passed through a door to death in his 84th year on 23 October 1956, four years after his elder brother, Robert Halket Punshon. On 25 January 1957 the widowed Sarah Punshon presented Dorothy L. Sayers with a copy of her husband’s thirty-fifth and final Bobby Owen mystery, the charmingly retrospective Six Were Present. “He would like to think that you had one,” wrote Sarah, warmly thanking Sayers “for your appreciation of my husband’s work during his writing life” and wistfully adding that she would miss her “occasional visits to the club evenings.” Sayers obligingly invited Sarah to the next Detection Club dinner as her guest, but Sarah died in May, having survived her longtime spouse by merely seven months. Sayers herself would not outlast the year. As Christianna Brand rather flippantly reports, Sayers was discovered, just eight days before Christmas, collapsed dead “at the foot of the stairs in her house surrounded by bereaved cats.” Having ascended and descended the stairs after a busy day of shopping, Sayers had discovered her own door to death.
* * * * *
Dorothy L. Sayers’s literary reputation has risen ever higher in the years since her demise, with modern authorities like the esteemed late crime writer P.D. James particularly lauding Sayers’s ambitious penultimate Peter Wimsey mystery, Gaudy Night--a novel E.R. Punshon himself had lavishly praised in his review column in the Manchester Guardian--as not only a great detective novel but a great novel, with no delimiting qualification. Although he was one of Sayers’s favorite crime writers, Punshon was not so fortunate with his own reputation, with his work falling into unmerited neglect for more than a half-century after his death. With the reprinting by Dean Street Press of Punshon’s complete set of Bobby Owen mystery investigations—chronicled in 35 novels, five short stories and a radio play—this long period of neglect now happily has ended, however, allowing a major writer from the Golden Age of detective fiction a golden opportunity to receive, six decades after his death, his full and lasting due.
Short Stories by E.R. Punshon
FIVE BOBBY OWEN detective short stories complement E.R. Punshon’s 35 Bobby Owen detective novels, and these short stories are reprinted, one to a volume, with the new Dean Street Press editions of Punshon’s The Attending Truth, Strange Ending, Brought to Light, Dark Is the Clue and Triple Quest. Although Punshon’s Bobby Owen detective novels appeared over nearly a quarter-century, between 1933 and 1956, the publication of the Bobby Owen short stories was much more concentrated, with the first one, “A Study in the Obvious,” appearing in the London Evening Standard on 23 August 1936 and the remaining four, “Making Sure,” “Good Beginning,” “Three Sovereigns” and “Find the Lady,” in the Evening Standard in 1950, on, respectively, 15 February, 1 August, 17 October and 21 December.
“A Study in the Obvious” appeared as part of an Evening Standard series devoted to “famous detectives of fiction,” edited by Dorothy L. Sayers. Besides Bobby Owen, fictional detectives included in “Detective Cavalcade” were Sherlock Holmes, Sexton Blake, Raffles, Eugene Valmont, Father Brown, the “Man in the Corner,” Max Carrados, Dr. Thorndyke, Dr. Priestley, Dr. Hailey, Hercule Poirot, Reggie Fortune, Philip Trent, Albert Campion, Lord Peter Wimsey, Roger Sheringham, Ludovic Travers, Mrs. Bradley, Mr. Pepper, Mr. Reeder, Mr. Pinkerton, Chief Constable Sir Clinton Driffield, Inspector French, Superintendent Wilson, Inspector Head, Uncle Abner, Trevis Tarrant, Charlie Chan and Ellery Queen.
As editor of the series Dorothy L. Sayers warned Gladys Mitchell, who was contributing an original Mrs. Bradley short story, that the Evening Standard “will probably say they want it as short as possible and as cheap a possible! Don’t let them screw you down to 4000 words, because I know they are prepared to go to 6000 words or thereabouts. . . . I have almost broken their hearts by pointing out to them that all the older people, like Conan Doyle and Austin Freeman, run out to something like 10,000 [words] and their columns will be frightfully congested.”
In her Evening Standard introduction to “A Study in the Obvious,” (2814 words) Sayers wrote:
E.R. Punshon’s detective novels are distinguished by two things: a delicate, sub-acid humour and a fine vein of romantic feeling. They fall into two groups—the stories about Inspector Carter and Detective-Sergeant Bell, and the more recent series about Superintendent Mitchell and Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen.
In this short story . . . Owen—that nobly-born and Oxford-bred young policeman—appears alone, exploiting his characteristic vein of inspired common sense.
The crime here is a trivial one; those who like to see serious crimes handled with delicate emotional perception should make a point of reading some of the novels, such as “Mystery Villa” and “Death of a Beauty Queen.”
“A Study in the Obvious,” which appeared the same year as The Bath Mysteries, a Punshon detective novel that delved into Sergeant Bobby Owen’s aristocratic family background, is Bobby Owen’s origin story, showing how he came to be a policeman. Though light, the tale is one of considerable charm that should delight Bobby Owen fans.
The later Evening Standard stories are shorter affairs, though they are all murder investigations. “Good Beginning” and “Find the Lady” take us back to earlier years in Bobby Owen’s police career, when he held the ranks of, respectively, constable and sergeant. “Making Sure” and “Three Sovereigns” capture something of that quality of what American mystery critic Anthony Boucher called “the obscure destinies that drive [Punshon’s] obsessed and tormented characters,” which so impressed Dorothy L. Sayers about Punshon’s novels.
Curtis Evans
CHAPTER I
RE-OPENING A CASE
COMMANDER BOBBY OWEN, C.I.D., Scotland Yard, had suggested to his wife, Olive, that they should take an evening stroll together. This had surprised Olive very much. For, in this respect at least, she was well aware she had married a man of extremes, one who knew no golden mean between sprawling in an arm-chair at home, most likely with his feet on another chair unless she were on the look-out, and doing six miles or so round the park in the hour before breakfast, all in the sacred name of keeping fit.
She asked no questions though, since, as Bobby spent his life both in asking quest
ions and answering them, they were things she tended to avoid. Now they had reached Mayfair Crescent, once upon a time so fashionable, so exclusively the home of the great, that even the crossing-sweeper at the corner had a cachet of his own and was apt to refuse mere coppers with a bow of such mingled dignity and reproach as seldom failed to achieve a transmutation into silver. But its glory had fled, as is inconstant glory’s habit, and in place of former magnificence the Crescent now consisted of gaps where stray bombs had fallen, a private hotel, two mansions still in the ‘stately homes of England’ class, others turned into single-room apartment houses, three in a row devoted to the needs of the overflow from the Ministry of Priorities, and others that had been converted into blocks of highly rented flats.
Of these last was No. 7, once the residence of a Duke, then of a wealthy brewer, whose intrusion into those then sacred precincts had been an omen of the decadence to come, and now reconstructed to provide nine more or less convenient, and much more rather than less expensive, ‘residential flats-de-luxe’, to quote the agent for the property.
Opposite No. 7’s front door was a pillar-box, and by it stood a girl, gazing up at No. 7 with an odd intensity of gaze as though she were putting to it a question she had little hope would receive an answer.
“See that girl?” Bobby asked.
“Why?” asked Olive, for indeed there was little chance of not seeing her, since she was so directly in front of them and so near.
A policeman came up from behind.
“That’s her, sir,” he said in passing, and then, without looking and crossing the road, disappeared down a side street opposite.
“Pretty girl,” remarked Bobby.
“Is she?” asked Olive with some doubt. “She looks worried, as if she had lost her boy and was wondering how to get him back, instead of being sensible about it, getting another, and never noticing the difference.”
“Don’t be cynical,” Bobby rebuked her, for cynicism was a reproach Olive sometimes hurled at him—not without effect.
The girl turned away from the pillar-box and came towards them. She was tall, fair, and young, her face pale and peaked, a certain light grace of movement visible in her walk and bearing. She certainly had claims to be called pretty, in spite of the signs of nervous strain Olive had remarked, though perhaps she was no more so than every young girl considers her birthright. Her best features were her complexion, which owed much to God and little to artifice, and her nose, which managed somehow to add a touch of piquancy to her face. Indeed, she did occasionally, when regarding herself in the mirror, murmur ‘tip tilted like the petals of a flower’, though she could not have told you where the line came from. She was wearing a neat little coat and skirt, ‘utility’ Olive decided, and she went by them with a hurried, uneven step, as though suddenly remembering some pressing errand.
“Who is she?” Olive asked, and she asked the question uneasily, as if already she had received some subtle warning of impending tragedy.
“A young lady who seems curiously interested in Number Seven Mayfair Crescent,” Bobby explained. “Number Seven Mayfair Crescent mean anything to you?”
“I don’t think so,” Olive said. “Why?”
“Remember what the papers called the Banquet Murder or the Chef Crime or things like that?”
“Oh, that,” Olive exclaimed. “The one nothing was ever found out about. Months ago, wasn’t it?”
“Yes. It was while I was in the U.S. over that atom-bomb scare that fizzled out like a damp squib. No clues in the Mayfair Crescent affair. Nothing to go on. A wash-out as far as the investigation went. I’ve been going through the dossier again. I didn’t see what else could have been done. Man found dead in the first floor front flat at Number Seven. Name of Hugh Newton. Probably he had more names than one. He always paid, rent included, in cash. No bank account, and some of his underclothing marked ‘H. A.’, not H. N. Nasty death. Mean sort of end. First he had been knocked out. Must have been a tremendous blow given with all his force by an exceptionally powerful man. Either by accident or design a cushion cover had been torn open and the poor devil’s mouth filled with feathers. It rather looked as if the feathers had been deliberately rammed as far down as they would go, but you can’t be sure, because before our chaps got there the caretaker, a man named Marks, had tried to clear the feathers away. An unconscious man with his mouth full of feathers wouldn’t have had much chance of surviving anyhow, and this one didn’t.”
“Weren’t there any friends or relatives?”
“None that we could hear of, and none came forward,” Bobby answered. “Somewhere or another there may be people wondering why they never hear now of a friend or relation with the initials ‘H. N.’. We may get an inquiry in time. There are men like that. They cut themselves off entirely from their past and live in the heart of London as the old hermits used to live in the Thebiad. Of course, sometimes they are just hiding.”
“Criminals?” Olive asked.
“Well, not as a rule,” Bobby answered. They had moved on now, and were walking slowly the length of the Crescent. “If they are, it is more often not from us but from their pals they’ve double-crossed. The double-crosser is always in danger, and if there isn’t much honour among thieves, there’s a very lively sense of what’s likely to happen to you if you turn informer. Or it may be their families they are hiding from—especially their wives.”
“Good gracious,” said Olive, incredulous and astonished.
“Or again merely a morbid love of solitude. Anyhow, London is full of such minor mysteries. Nothing to show what the explanation was in this case. Not that Hugh Newton can have been entirely without outside connections. He had been expecting a visitor. The table was laid for two, and there was a most elaborate meal in course of preparation.”
“What was it?” Olive asked, interested.
“Oh, I don’t know exactly, it’s all there in the reports,” Bobby told her. “But the care taken over it did rather suggest the expected visitor was someone it was advisable for some reason to treat extra well. Did I say he was wearing a chef’s cap and apron? But I doubt if our people would have paid much attention, only for Johnny Staples.”
“Who is he?”
“He’s the Daily Announcer’s crime expert and also their cookery editor. Queer mixture—cookery and crime. No accounting for tastes, though. The Announcer being a cultural paper, he signs as ‘Lucullus’, and what he says, goes. Whacking sale of his articles in book form.”
“I know,” Olive admitted dispiritedly, for often these articles soared to elysian heights she felt she could never climb, not at least till wine became less expensive and butter more plentiful.
“Johnny did rather lay it on thick,” Bobby continued, “but he did come along to us to insist it was a line our chaps ought to follow up. Someone known to the Food and Wine Society, or something like that. He said there weren’t a dozen men in England, outside the professionals, who could live up to that dinner on their own. It was tried, but got us nowhere. No professional chef missing, and there are so many first-class amateurs there wasn’t much chance there. Astonishing number of men fancy themselves as cooks, and really good at it, too.”
“I wish all men did,” said Olive, and gazed wistfully at the stars above.
“No robbery,” Bobby went on unheedingly. “Money and some jewellery left untouched. At the time it was thought two people must have been concerned, even though it looked as if only one guest was expected. A man—no woman could have knocked the poor devil out the way he was. A good straight left right in the middle of the face. A tremendous blow, must have been a whacking big chap who landed it. Expert opinion. There was even some idea of rounding up all the known swell boxers. Came to nothing. But the idea of killing by pushing feathers down your throat looks more like a woman.”
“Ugh,” said Olive and complained: “Why always put it down to a woman when it’s something specially nasty?”
“Because,” Bobby explained, “when women a
re, they generally rather specially are.”
Olive tried to unravel this remark so far at least as to be able to decide whether it was meant in a complimentary sense or not. As it was the utterance of a husband, she came to the conclusion that most likely it wasn’t. But not being sure, she thought it would be as well to change the subject, and she asked:
“What has it all got to do with that girl you were making eyes at just now?”
“I wasn’t,” protested Bobby. “I never do—anyhow, not when my wife’s there. Things have been happening. As no claimant turned up for Mr Newton’s goods and chattels, the Crown took over, stored the furniture, used what ready cash there was—not much—to pay expenses and fees, and then released the flat. There have been two breakings-in since the murder. The first immediately afterwards, and a very thorough job was done, ransacking the place. Nothing taken as far as is known, except oddly enough a pile of travel agent’s advertisements, and a lot of postcards of continental resorts. Suggested, of course, that Hugh Newton liked to go abroad, but that wasn’t much help either. The second time was soon after new people had moved in—a Mr Pyne and his wife and daughter. Pyne is a Civil Servant—Ministry of Priorities. The two women were out one evening, and when they got back they couldn’t get in. Our people were called, climbed in at the back, and found Mr Pyne tied up in a corner, most uncomfortably, with a sheet thrown over him so he couldn’t see what was going on. Once again the place had been ransacked and nothing taken, except two wrist-watches. An odd feature is that both were returned anonymously through the post a few days later. So it does look as if the flat were still an object of interest to someone for some reason.”
Strange Ending: A Bobby Owen Mystery Page 2