Comes a Stranger

by E. R. Punshon

  E.R. Punshon

  COMES A STRANGER

  “You see,” Miss Kayne said, “I committed a murder once myself.”

  Miss Kayne’s proud boast to Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen is that she has committed the Perfect Murder – a crime with no clues. Bobby thinks at first it is a macabre joke, but before long a body is reportedly found, stabbed in the world-famous Kayne Library. When Bobby gets to the scene, the corpse has disappeared. But instead Miss Kayne’s cousin, Nat, is found in a nearby country lane – shot through the heart. Were the two murders connected – or were there even two? Bobby finds himself embroiled in one of the most ingenious and sinister cases of his career. Can he prove this was not a case of Perfect Murder?

  Comes a Stranger, originally published in 1938, is the eleventh novel in the Bobby Owen mystery series. This new edition features an introduction and afterword by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

  “Death has no advantage, but when it comes a stranger”

  (FRANCIS QUARLES)

  INTRODUCTION

  With Comes a Stranger, E. R. Punshon’s eleventh Bobby Owen detective novel, the author found inspiration for his plot in remarkable contemporary real life events, to which he circumspectly alluded in an author’s note at the beginning of the book. In this introduction I discuss the novel without reference to the actual events that inspired its composition. The latter subject I address in an afterword, which readers should peruse only after they have finished the novel, on account of major plot spoilers contained therein.

  During the course of his murder investigation in Dictator’s Way, the Bobby Owen detective novel that immediately preceded Comes a Stranger, Detective Sergeant Owen, like other handsome, well-born fictional crime solvers of his day, such as Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey and Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Roderick Alleyn, falls in love with one of the suspects in the case: Olive Farrar, lovely owner of a chic London hat shop. In Comes a Stranger, Bobby and Olive, who happily proved not to be the actual guilty party in the earlier novel, are engaged to be married. The couple are chastely spending some time in the country, Bobby staying in Wynton Village at the Wynton Arms, and Olive at nearby Wynton Lodge, country home of eccentric Miss Kayne, an old friend of her family, and the locale of the world-renowned Kayne library.

  The Kayne Library, which was brought into existence by Miss Kayne’s late father and now “perhaps the finest collection of books in private hands,” is the object of considerable contention as the novel opens. Over the library imperiously presides the intimidating noted bibliographical scholar Mr. Broast, timorously assisted by his wallflower secretary, Miss Perkins. However, the library is under the sole control, during her lifetime, of Miss Kayne, pending any compelling evidence brought forth by the trustees--Miss Kayne’s cousin, Nathaniel Kayne, and her near neighbor, bibliophile Sir William Winders--of maladministration on her part. Both of the trustees are desirous of finding just such evidence, Winders because he wants to replace Mr. Broast as librarian either with himself or someone loyal to him, Nathaniel Kayne because he hopes to close the library and sell off the books to the University of Wales, pocketing a big profit. (Under the terms of the will he is Miss Kayne’s heir.) For his part, Bobby has the impression that Miss Kayne, who has devoted her life to nurturing her father’s brainchild, “felt towards that wonderful collection of books a little as Frankenstein felt towards the monster of his creation.”

  At the end of chapter five a report comes to Sergeant Owen of, most classically, a body in the library, yet when he arrives upon the scene he is unable to locate said body. However, a bullet-riddled corpse, this one definitely verified, soon turns up in the sunken lane through Wynton Wood, and Bobby’s assistance thereupon is secured by local law enforcement to help them solve this most perplexing problem, one that will see more deaths before it is untangled. A slashed portrait, a tale of an old lover’s long-hidden poems, an American with the remarkable, Elmer Gantry-ish name of Bertram A. Virtue and a box of forget-me-nots all play parts in one of E.R. Punshon’s most beguiling tales of mystery.

  Along the way the reader is treated to some superb examples of the author’s engaging wit and wisdom. The county constable, Major Harley, is much enamored with Freud and theorizes throughout the novel that sexual repression may be a factor in the case:

  “Repressed sex instinct. Knew she wasn’t attractive to men and wanted to make other people think she was. I’ve known instances. It’s all in Freud. He knows.”

  “Repressed sex instinct again,” explained the Major. “She was in love with him. Didn’t you notice the way she talked about his good looks?...I’ve known cases—these sex-starved, unattractive women. Pathetic, you know.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Bobby.

  “These sex-starved women…” [The Major] left the sentence unfinished except for shaking his head doubtfully. “Freud, you know,” he said abruptly.

  Bobby didn’t know, so he made no reply, and the Major shook his head again.

  “Anyhow, first glimpse of a motive we’ve had,” [the Major] pronounced. “Very good looking young fellow….The girl is obsessed by him. She knows she has no chance. It grows on her. She can’t have him in life. She will in death. Sex starved. That’s it, perhaps. Worth considering.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Bobby, though what he meant was “No, sir”….

  Later Bobby discusses the case with Olive, mentioning Major Harley’s pet theory about the manic compulsions of sex-starved women (“Freud, you know”), which the spirited Olive ripostes with keen feminist insight:

  “It’s very horrid of him,” said Olive. “Why is it always women who are supposed to be sex starved? Why not men for a change?

  “Well, I suppose men needn’t be if they don’t want.”

  “Women needn’t either, need they? Not now, not to-day. My gracious, walk along Piccadilly, if you’re a girl, I mean, and see how many men are willing to relieve any symptoms of sex starvation. Piccadilly may not be flowing with milk and honey, but it certainly is with the most obliging men. Sex starvation fiddlesticks….Sex starvation is just a phrase invented by gentlemen who don’t want to run any risk of suffering from it themselves, blast them. It’s all a dodge to make women easy.”

  Olive herself is a London career woman, owner of “Olive, Hats,” and contemplates marriage to Bobby with some level of trepidation: “All very well to talk about sex equality, but the eternities remained, and what a woman gave, she gave, and could never have again. But what a man took, he took and could go on taking, so where was your equality?” Somewhat undercutting this observation Punshon adds that, nevertheless, after Olive sees Bobby looking at her, “no thought was left in her any more, only a great wish that she had more to give and ever more.” Readers unimpressed with this last sentiment should compare it with Margery Allingham’s observations on marriage and feminine sacrifice in her detective novel The Fashion in Shrouds, also published in 1938; I think they will find Punshon the more modern of the two authors in this regard.

  Comes a Stranger inaugurated the period of, arguably, Punshon’s finest crime fiction, and it was highly favorably received by English reviewers. (Mystifyingly, it and the next six Bobby Owen detective novels were not published in the United States.) Reviewing Stranger in the Spectator, Punshon’s Detection Club colleague Nicholas Blake (the leftist poet Cecil Day Lewis) conceded that while the novel “reverts to that venerable crime chestnut, the Body in the Library” (this four years before the publication of Agatha Christie’s celebrated Miss Marple detective novel of that title), “Mr. Punshon garnishes his crime with a wealth of bibliography which adds to its fascination.” Comes a Stranger was, he declared, “a first-rate story” with a “terrific climax.” On this score, Mr. Blake will get no argument from me.
It is a great pleasure to welcome Comes a Stranger, a mystery set in a library of precious rare books that is itself the rarest of E.R. Punshon’s detective novels, back in print after nearly eighty years. Classic crime fiction fans are in for a rare treat.

  Curtis Evans

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Because this story was suggested by, and is indeed founded upon, certain recent occurrences, on which, however, for good reason, little emphasis was laid in the public press, it is all the more necessary to insist that neither personages, incidents nor localities have any resemblance even in the slightest degree, to actual places, persons, or events.

  There is, there never has been, any library, public or private, in any way resembling the Kayne library. The owner, the trustees, the librarian, are all equally creatures of the imagination, and have no relation to any person, living or dead.

  Certain liberties, too, for the purposes of the tale, have been taken with the facts of bibliography. There is, for example, no reason to suppose that Caxton did in fact print an edition of the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, even though it is a little surprising that so popular a work—a ‘best seller’ for centuries—did not pass through his press. But it is hoped that such liberties as have been taken are of comparatively minor importance, and that if, by any remote chance, this work falls into the hands of the expert bibliographer, he will not find in it too much to arouse indignation.

  CHAPTER I

  THE PERFECT MURDER

  “You see,” explained Miss Kayne, wheezing a little, her tiny voice issuing as it were with difficulty from the mountainous flesh encasing it and her, ‘‘I was so interested when I saw that paragraph about dear Olive engaged to a detective. So exciting.”

  “Oh, yes,” answered Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen, polite but bored, wondering vaguely why everyone thought a detective’s life exciting when in reality it consisted chiefly of routine work any city clerk would think deadly dull.

  “Because, you see,” Miss Kayne went on, “I committed a murder once myself.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Bobby brightly, getting ready to laugh as soon as he saw exactly where the joke was supposed to lie.

  “The perfect murder,” mused Miss Kayne in her small and distant voice. “I think—the perfect murder.”

  “Indeed,” said Bobby, still brightly, still wondering what, exactly, was the joke, and when he would have to laugh.

  “You would call it that, wouldn’t you?” Miss Kayne went on, looking at him earnestly, “when there’s never even any suspicion—when the murdered person just vanishes and is never even missed, and no questions are ever asked?”

  “Well, I suppose so,” agreed Bobby. “Only it doesn’t happen like that, you know.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Why, er—” Bobby said, a little taken aback by the direct question, by something forceful, too, he seemed to feel in it.

  “Do have another cup of tea,” she urged. ‘‘Or a whisky and soda? You would prefer that? If you’ll ring the bell, Briggs will get it.”

  “Oh, no, thanks, I never touch spirits in the day time,” Bobby explained. “Sometimes at night just before going to bed. But that’s all.”

  The conversation languished. Bobby supposed the subject of the perfect murder, of the victim who vanished and was never even missed, had now been exhausted. Certainly this enormous old woman, sunk in fat, her swollen feet in great, shapeless slippers, so ponderous that, as he knew, for Olive had told him, it was all she could do to rise from her chair without assistance, in no way suggested a murderess.

  Bobby was paying this visit at Olive’s request, and because it is part of the duty of the newly-engaged to present themselves for the inspection and approval of the friends and relatives of the other party. Miss Kayne was, he knew, a very old friend of Olive’s, though one from whom she had not heard for a number of years till there had appeared paragraphs in the papers announcing their engagement. The papers noticed it, because it came as a sequel to a sensational case of murder that on account of its political aspects had attracted general attention, and so there had been various headlines about Romantic Sequel to Sensational Political Killings.

  As a result there had arrived a letter from this old friend of Olive’s, asking her and Bobby to spend a week at Wynton Lodge, Miss Kayne’s residence in the village of Wynton, near Mayfield, a town of some size. Wynton Lodge was, too, the home of the famous Kayne library Miss Kayne’s father had built up through many ardent years, till now it had a world-wide reputation. Olive had accepted the invitation, glad to renew an old friendship, but Bobby’s duties at Scotland Yard had only permitted him to run down this afternoon on his new motor cycle for which he had just finished paying, and now was wondering for much he could sell it again, since, in view of his engagement, pots and pans, curtains and carpets, were all becoming of more importance than motor cycles.

  So far it had proved rather a boring visit. Of course, Miss Kayne was an important person, as the owner of the celebrated library that held all sorts of bookish treasures. But then Bobby did not know much about books, nor was he overwhelmingly interested in them. He was wondering now what to say next. He wished Miss Kayne would make some remark, and with something of a start he realized how closely she was watching him from small, malignant eyes, deep hidden like knives in ambush behind huge rolls of fat. It was almost as though she expected him to take her remark seriously. It was almost as though she challenged and defied either him or the impersonal authority of the law that sometimes he represented. Then he supposed that perhaps she was annoyed because he had not yet seen the point of her joke about the ‘perfect murder’, and had made no suitable response. Or perhaps she didn’t like detectives, or perhaps she just simply didn’t like him, or, more probably and naturally, merely thought it was a pity a girl like Olive should be throwing herself away on a detective-sergeant of police.

  He wished Olive would come back. She had gone to see if they might visit the famous library. He let his gaze wander out of the window to rest on the tall, blank wall of the annexe built out from the main body of the house, like a thrusting arm, wherein the great Kayne collection of books was contained. There were no windows, it was just a great blank wall, like that of a gaol or a fortress to guard some secret prisoner.

  Silly, of course. What secret prisoner could a famous library hold? But why should a library be built like a gaol?

  Suddenly he became aware that Miss Kayne was shaking with a hidden, silent mirth. Her laughter seemed to run all over her huge body, and yet it found no outlet in sound.

  Even her chair, an enormous construction in solid oak, shook with it, and her cushions that were about her like a sea. There she sat and rumbled with an inner merriment, but a merriment in which her small, bright, deep sunken eyes had no share, for in them as they peeped out at Bobby he thought he recognized a secret, hidden hate. She said:—

  “That’s the library building you’re looking at, the Kayne library.”

  Was it the library she hated, he wondered? Or something that the library stood for? Or was he himself, for some reason, the object of her anger?

  “I was wondering,” he said slowly, “why there are no windows.”

  “South wall,” she explained. “When my father built it he wanted no windows on that wall because he thought direct sunlight might be bad for the books, their bindings especially.”

  “I see,” said Bobby.

  “There are windows on the other wall, the north wall and at the west end,” she told him. “They all have steel shutters, though.”

  “Steel?”

  “Protection against burglars,” she explained. “Some of the books are very valuable. Against burglars—and fire.”

  Her mirth had ceased now, but she pronounced this last word with a strange and puzzling accent, lingering on it as though she loved its sound and yet dreaded it as well. A strange old woman, Bobby thought, and with a certain disquiet his mind returned to that declaration of hers about the perfect mur
der she said she had once committed. Nonsense, of course, and yet those small, malignant eyes of hers were still watching him, he saw, like enemies in ambush.

  “We must take every possible precaution against fire,” she said again, and again her small, clear voice lingered on the final word.

  “Oh yes, of course,” agreed Bobby, who knew, for it was common knowledge, that there were many valuable treasures in the Kayne library.

  There was the Glastonbury Second Psalter, for instance, snatched from under the very nose of the British Museum authorities hesitant on an authenticity now triumphantly established, so that the thousand pounds for which it had been purchased had increased tenfold. Or those so precious fragmentary pages of the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, printed by Caxton. Till their discovery by Mr. Broast, the Kayne Library custodian, in the South of France, it had not been known that Caxton had ever printed the Mandeville Travels, even though the guess had often been hazarded that so popular a work was almost certain to have passed through his press. The discovery of these fragmentary pages—a score of them, twelve consecutive—the sole relics of an edition that otherwise had vanished utterly, provided therefore a first class sensation, and the eight odd pages had been sold for enormous sums, mostly in America. The other pages, the consecutive ones, remained in the library, all offers, no matter how extravagant, being sternly refused. No wonder, then, that precautions like steel shutters were employed against theft and fire. Only it was odd how strangely that thin, remote voice of Miss Kayne’s lingered upon this last word, as though it held for her some dreadful and unnamed attraction.

  “A penny for your thoughts,” she said unexpectedly, as though she had guessed something of what was passing through his mind. He had the idea indeed that there was little those small, bright eyes of hers did not see, and little, too, of what they saw that when they saw they did not hate. In quite a different tone she said: “Well, when are you and Olive going to get married?”