The Secret Search: A Bobby Owen Mystery

by E. R. Punshon

  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 a week 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.

  Crime Fiction Reviews by E.R. Punshon

  E.R. PUNSHON reviewed crime fiction for the Manchester Guardian, a newspaper congenial to his own Liberal Party sympathies, in 70 insightful and witty columns published between 13 November 1935 and 27 May 1942. A total of 369 books were included in Punshon’s near-monthly column, making his reviews one of the larger bodies of crime fiction criticism by a Golden Age detective novelist. (In Punshon’s company we also find, among others, Dashiell Hammett, Anthony Boucher, Todd Downing and Punshon’s Detection Club colleagues Dorothy L. Sayers, John Dickson Carr, Anthony Berkeley, Milward Kennedy, Julian Symons and Edmund Crispin.)

  Punshon’s crime fiction reviews, selections from which are included in Dean Street Press’s new editions of the novels So Many Doors, Everybody Always Tells, The Secret Search and The Golden Dagger, indicate a partiality on the author and critic’s part toward classical detective fiction, especially works by present and future Detection Club members, including, for example, both richly literary whodunits by Dorothy L. Sayers, E.C. Bentley and Michael Innes and ingenious yet austere efforts by John Rhode, J.J. Connington and Freeman Wills Crofts. Yet though Punshon figuratively threw bouquets at the feet of Dorothy L. Sayers, whose own rave review of Punshon’s first Bobby Owen detective novel, Information Received (1933), was a great boon to Punshon’s career as a mystery writer, in his columns he forbore neither from occasionally criticizing works by other Detection Club members nor from tendering advice on improvement. He also demonstrated interest in American crime fiction, reviewing not just detective novels by classicists like S.S. Van Dine and Ellery Queen, but suspense novels by Mignon Eberhart and tougher fare like Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely. Altogether Punshon’s crime fiction reviews offer both the mystery scholar a valuable research tool and the mystery fan wise pointers for further reading.

  Curtis Evans

  CHAPTER I

  “MASQUERADING AS ME”

  “AND HOW,” asked Olive, looking sternly at her husband across the table—“how did you like your nice whale-steak?”

  “Eh, what?” asked Bobby, rousing himself from that deep abstraction in which he had been sunk during the meal. “Oh, jolly good! Yes, definitely. Jolly good!”

  Olive rose to her feet, majestic in wrath.

  “Heaven defend me from all men, especially husbands,” she declaimed. “Here I stand hours and hours in a queue for liver: calves’ liver, English calves’ liver. I get it and I cook it and I serve it, and the man doesn’t even know! Whale-meat indeed!”

  “Oh, sorry,” said Bobby, feebly apologetic. “It’s only—well, I’m a bit worried.”

  “If you had told me,” Olive retorted, unappeased, “you could have had your whale-meat, and my feet wouldn’t ache the way they do.”

  “Sub-consciously,” Bobby argued, trying to talk himself out of it, “I really did know it was something special. I did say ‘Jolly good’, didn’t I? It shows, doesn’t it?”

  “Shows what?” demanded Olive; and, as Bobby didn’t know, he didn’t answer, but passed his cup for more coffee instead, and Olive filled it and said: “Well, what’s worrying you?”

  “Remember Cy King?” Bobby asked.

  Olive nodded, uneasily, for Cy King was the name of a notorious gangster who for long had managed, by a combination of daring, skill and cunning, all in an unusual degree, to keep out of the hands of the police. At long last this immunity had been broken down, and, chiefly through Bobby’s instrumentality, he had been convicted and sentenced. But on a comparatively minor charge, so that his term of imprisonment had lasted only a few months. His vanity, his influence among his companions, his prestige, had, however, all suffered badly from this misfortune, and prestige is as necessary to a successful gang leader as it is in any other profession. Moreover, now his finger-prints and general description were on record, his photograph had been circulated in the official ‘Police Gazette’, and so immunity had become merely a dream of a happier past. He now spent a good deal of time talking about all the unpleasant things he would like to do to Bobby as and when opportunity served.

  “Has he been doing anything?” Olive asked.

  “Apparently, according to a report from on
e of our contacts, getting up a pal of his to look like me,” Bobby answered.

  “Goodness!” exclaimed Olive. “Whatever for?”

  “That’s what’s bothering me,” Bobby told her. “I don’t much like the idea of one of Cy King’s lot masquerading as me. Cheek. Very likely it doesn’t amount to much. Their idea of a joke, perhaps, though Cy King’s notion of fun is generally anything but funny. Or it may be something serious. There’s a report Cy King has been seen hanging about Southam, and that’s a long way outside his usual beat. Looks like something might be brewing out there.”

  “Where’s Southam?” Olive asked.

  “Used to be a jolly little village,” Bobby explained. “I’ve played cricket there. Now it’s just another dormitory suburb—cinemas, multiple stores, tube, ’buses, all complete. The common’s still there, though, just as it has been since the beginning of things, and I hope will be to the end of them. One of our chaps at Southam recognised Cy King from the photo we circulated, and he says he’s seen him there twice recently. He didn’t think much of it the first time, but a second time made him sit up and take notice. Especially as this time Cy was waiting in a car outside a Mr Smith’s house.”

  “One of his friends?” Olive asked. “Receiver or something?”

  “Not as far as is known,” Bobby told her. “Appears to be a highly respectable, very well-to-do, retired business man. Old. In poor health. He has a niece living with him, and there’s a housekeeper. Grows roses, employs a gardener, takes a mild interest in Church and politics, and subscribes liberally to any local fund. Our man—quite a young fellow, name of Ford; I shall have to ask him if he would like to apply for a transfer to C.I.D.—wondered what Cy was doing there. So he hung about round a corner somewhere, and saw a chap come out of the house, get into Cy’s car, and drive off. Ford rather boggled about this part of it; finally I got it out of him that at first, just for a moment, he thought it was me.”

  “Why?”

  “He didn’t seem to know exactly. He got the impression, he said. Only for a moment. Same make of suit. My old school tie I sometimes wear. Same way of walking. So on.”

  “It seems most awfully funny,” declared the much-puzzled Olive. “Why on earth should anyone want to look like you? Of course,” she added kindly, “you can’t help it, but any one else can, can’t they?”

  “If you are trying to make any insinuations,” Bobby observed, “I would like to remind you that my looks are sufficiently up to standard for a certain young woman once to fall madly in love with me—head over heels, splash, just like that.”

  “Who was she?” asked Olive, interested. “You ought to have told me before.”

  “And for two pins,” Bobby added, “I wouldn’t take you to the cinema to-night.”

  “Oh, are we going?” Olive cried, delighted, for it was but seldom they had the chance of a night out together.

  “At Southam,” Bobby added. “I’ll get the car.”

  “Southam?” repeated Olive, disappointed this time. “I thought you meant that new film at the Top-Notch in Leicester Square.”

  “This is official,” Bobby explained. “Petrol and two cinema seats, but not yours, going down as expenses. Mr Smith and his niece go regularly every week. I want to see them. If Smith is a receiver and in with Cy King, well, I may know him—or the niece, if she’s in it, as she would be most likely. In any case, when one of Cy King’s friends pays an afternoon call, I want to know more about it. If Mr Smith is what he seems to be—well-to-do retired business man—he may need protection, and need it pretty badly. People often do when Cy King is around.”

  Accordingly, some half-hour or so later, Bobby and Olive, their car parked outside, entered a Southam cinema, one of the well-known ‘Glorious’ circuit, where, by good fortune, the film being shown was one Olive had long wanted to see.

  A man who, umbrella under arm, though it was a fine night, had been hanging about outside, sidled up to them. He muttered to Bobby.

  “To report, sir. Name of Ford.”

  “Right,” said Bobby.

  “Four-and-ninepenny circle, sir,” Ford went on. “They always sit there—places kept for them regular once every week in the front row.”

  Bobby nodded, bought three tickets, and slipped one to Constable Ford. Together they ascended the stairway, magnificent in gilt and plush. Ford murmured:

  “Housekeeper gone out, so the house is empty. We’ve put a man to watch, and the housekeeper’s being followed.”

  “Good,” said Bobby. “As soon as you see Mr Smith or the young lady showing any sign of leaving, let your umbrella fall to give us time to get out first. When they go, follow as close behind as possible, so I can be sure who they are, though I expect I shall be able to spot them from the description you ’phoned. Do you always carry an umbrella?”

  “Well, sir,” Ford answered, with some slight hesitation, “I’ve doctored the handle a bit. A little lead. Sort of handy if a rough house develops.”

  “I thought so from the way you carried it,” Bobby remarked. “I should try to hold it more naturally, if I were you.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Ford, and dropped discreetly behind, while Bobby and Olive went on to take their seats.

  “Are you thinking there may be a burglary at Mr Smith’s?” Olive whispered.

  “Well, it all rather suggests that Mr Smith is either an accomplice or a destined victim,” Bobby answered. “The latter, more likely. Possibly both. Dog very much eats dog in Cy King’s world. Cy may have got to know Mr Smith keeps money by him. People do at times. Quite large sums in their bedrooms in a safe you can open with a screw-driver—or a tin-opener. And can’t be covered by insurance. Or jewellery, perhaps. Some people are buying diamonds as a kind of safeguard against more devaluation. Postage stamps, too.”

  They settled themselves in their seats, choosing two at the back of the circle and near the gangway, so that they could get out quickly when Ford gave the dropped umbrella signal. The main feature film was followed by one of those intolerable ‘shorts’ with which occasionally the cinema industry insults the intelligence of even the least intelligent of its patrons. The audience began to drift away, patiently hoping for better things next time. Ford let his umbrella fall and picked it up again. Bobby nudged Olive, and they joined the outgoing trickle. In the foyer they lingered as if waiting for a friend. A little old man came out, accompanied by a tall, fair girl who overtopped him by five or six inches. Behind them came Ford, trying to dangle his umbrella as carelessly as possible. He caught Bobby’s eye and nodded towards the little old man and the tall girl with him. Bobby and Olive followed them down the stairs, noting with what care and solicitude the girl watched over her companion. In the entrance hall she fussed to see he had his scarf well wrapped round his throat, his overcoat buttoned up. One of the cinema attendants watched approvingly, but the old man himself grumbled a little, protesting he wasn’t a child, but all the same he was clearly not displeased. The girl said:

  “Now, nunks, you mustn’t risk catching cold, must you?”

  They went out and disappeared in the night. Bobby and Olive found their car and waited in it. Ford appeared.

  “’Phone message,” he said. “Everything O.K. at the house. Mr Smith and the young lady just got back. By ’bus.”

  “Good,” said Bobby, “keep as good a watch as you can manage for the next few days, especially if a car is seen hanging about. Day raids are almost as common now as burglaries. Easier to get away in the day-time. We don’t want to hear of Mr Smith and his niece being knocked out or tied up—that sort of thing.”

  “No, sir. We’ll keep our eyes open. I’ll report what you say, sir.”

  Another man appeared by the side of the car. He said:

  “Message received, sir. Housekeeper followed as per instructions received. Same took tube to Leicester Square and proceeded to Jimmy Joe’s in Soho. Was there thirty-seven minutes. Then left and proceeded to Tottenham Court Road, where seen to take Southam tube. W
as not followed farther.”

  “Doesn’t look too good,” Bobby remarked. “Nothing we can do for the time, though, except watch.”

  He said good night to the two Southam men and drove away. Olive said:

  “What’s Jimmy Joe’s?”

  “Hot spot,” Bobby answered and chuckled faintly. “Very hot spot,” and once again he indulged in a small chuckle.

  “What’s the joke?” Olive inquired suspiciously.

  “Well, you see,” Bobby explained, “Jimmy Joe’s been asking for police protection, and that tickled our people to death. The only protection they want to give him is a five-year stretch in one of His Majesty’s gaols.”

  “What’s he want protection for?” Olive asked.

  “Oh, there’s a queer old boy, known as Russky, hangs about Soho,” answered Bobby. “Lots of queer people, young and old, in Soho, for that matter; but Jimmy Joe—he’s half Italian—swears Russky has the evil eye. He complains that if Russky comes into his cafe, customers get up and go out, and if Russky is already there, then customers won’t come in. Well, he was told evil eyes weren’t police concern, and then he tried to make out Russky peddled drugs. Not a scrap of evidence, though it does seem Russky is a bit of a herbalist and gives treatment sometimes. But if he does, he doesn’t take pay.”