Everybody Always Tells: 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

  “I SAW IT MYSELF”

  THIS FAMOUS LONDON store was not holding a sale. Its large full-page advertisements had merely stated modestly that it was offering to its customers an unparalleled opportunity for securing unrepeatable bargains. Bobby Owen, quite an important person nowadays at Scotland Yard, and at the moment enjoying a day’s leave, was following, faint but pursuing, in the wake of Olive, his wife. His arms were full of parcels, his legs were weary, his mind was all one great wistful thought of lunch, his eyes had all they could do to keep themselves fixed on Olive, as sometimes she pressed fiercely forward to her distant objective of that special unheard-of bargain which had chiefly excited her desire, and sometimes swerved through the press to discover why the fray seemed thickest round this or that counter. Who could tell but that there might be precisely what one needed above all else?

  On a sudden Bobby was aware of a little grey lady standing by his side. There was a large paper parcel under her arm. Evidently she had secured her bargain early, and now was looking round for another. She was so completely one with all the rest of that busy crowd that nobody could possibly have thought of giving her a second glance. Unless of envy that she had secured her purchase already. She looked up at Bobby imploringly, as if wondering if she dared ask him the time or something like that. Bobby looked back at her reproachfully. Then, with a guilty start, he looked away. Alas! in this one brief moment in which he had removed his eyes from Olive’s distant figure she had vanished as for ever in that vast eddy of eager, hurrying femininity.

  Fortunately he had taken the precaution of warning Olive that if they became separated they would meet in the lounge of the store restaurant. So, giving up all hope of finding her again till then, he shifted the burden of his parcels, in an effort to relieve the arm that seemed to ache most, and wandered abstractedly away in the wake of the little grey lady, who for her part had wandered, equally abstractedly, to a spot, deserted and lonely, because there were offered no such absolutely unique opportunities as blossomed in their hundreds and their thousands elsewhere. To her Bobby said, still reproachfully:

  “I was sorry to hear, Miss Rice, that you had resigned. It’s difficult for us at the Yard to carry on if all our best people keep on leaving.”

  “I was offered twice what I was getting,” Miss Rice an
swered simply.

  Bobby, recognizing the force of this argument, did not attempt to reply, and took the opportunity of relieving himself of his parcels by depositing them in a heap on an adjacent counter. Miss Rice said:

  “You ought to have a shopping-bag to put them in.”

  “You mean a portmanteau, don’t you?” Bobby corrected her. “I see you’ve got your bargain all right,” he added.

  “Stuffed with tissue paper,” Miss Rice informed him, balancing that large parcel on an outstretched forefinger. “Store detectives, especially head store detectives, are not allowed. We get a chance only at what’s left over. Ever heard of Lord Newdagonby?”

  “Not that I remember,” Bobby answered. “Why? Has he a record?”

  “Well, he’s a peer of the realm,” Miss Rice explained, slightly shocked.

  “His misfortune or his fault?” Bobby asked.

  “Enormously wealthy, or at least as enormously wealthy as anyone can be nowadays,” continued Miss Rice. “He is one of our directors, and in ‘Who’s Who’ he gives his recreations as mathematics and philosophy.”

  “What a rollicking time he must have!” murmured Bobby, doing his best to sound envious.

  “And I’ve just seen him pick up something from the jewellery—I couldn’t see exactly what—and slip it into Mrs Owen’s handbag when she wasn’t looking.”

  Bobby had seen and known too much that was strange to be easily surprised, but this time he fairly gasped.

  “Are you sure?” he asked, rather feebly, for Miss Rice, as he very well knew, was not the sort of person to make such a statement without very good reason.

  “I saw it myself,” Miss Rice answered. “One of my girls had noticed him. She didn’t know who he was, and she thought he was acting suspiciously. She said he seemed to be following Mrs Owen. Of course, she didn’t know Mrs Owen either, and she thought perhaps they were working it together. Couples do sometimes, you know. One to take, and one to keep. She told me, and I said I would watch. I’m sure Lord Newdagonby saw me. And I saw him pass his hand over Mrs Owen’s handbag and drop something in. I believe he meant me to see.”

  “Do you think possibly he had really taken it?” Bobby asked, “and then he saw you and decided he had better get rid of it, and so just pushed it into the first handbag he saw half-open—as,” Bobby added, “most of ’em are half of the time, and I daresay my wife’s like the rest.”

  “Don’t I know it?” retorted Miss Rice. “Or else a shopping-basket in provisions with a purse on top shouting ‘Won’t someone please go off with me?’ But Mrs Owen’s was only open just that minute while she was paying for what she had been buying.”

  “Another parcel coming?” Bobby sighed, glancing at the pile on the nearby counter.

  “A silk head-scarf,” Miss Rice told him, “and will go in your pocket easily, so don’t grumble at nothing, and one of the really, real bargains. Most people never notice, but Mrs Owen spotted it. The Buyer tipped me off, and I’m hoping one or two will be left so I can get one after closing.”

  A voice from behind said:

  “If I’m interrupting a hot flirtation, don’t mind me.”

  “Hullo, Olive,” Bobby exclaimed, turning round. “How on earth have you managed to find me in this hullabaloo?”

  “What hullabaloo?” asked Olive. “They are a bit busy,” she admitted, looking round.

  “Talking of hot flirtations,” Bobby said, “have you been having one yourself with Lord Newdagonby?”

  “Who is Lord Newdagonby?” Olive asked.

  “He seems to have been making subtle advances to you,” Bobby told her.

  “Oh, how nice!” cried Olive, enchanted.

  “Look in your handbag,” said Bobby.

  “What for?” asked Olive.

  “Do as you are told,” said Bobby with firm, husbandly authority.

  “Oh, my lord and master, to hear is to obey,” said Olive with true wifely meekness, and did so. Then she said, “Oh”.

  For there, lying on the top of a varied contents, ranging from a small paper-bag of chocolates to scraps of material preserved for matching, was a string of artificial pearls of the kind sold before the second world war for a guinea or two, and to-day for ten times as much.

  “From the jewellery counter,” said Miss Rice. “Price not reduced. He must have had it all ready to pop in.”

  “Who had?” said Olive, very bewildered and a little alarmed as well.

  “Lord Newdagonby,” said Bobby. “Miss Rice was just telling me. She saw him slip it into your bag when you weren’t looking.”

  “Who is Lord Newdagonby?” Olive repeated.

  “The point is,” Bobby said, “what was he up to? Of course, if it was the beginning or continuation of a courtship, of which I as a stern husband . . .”

  “Don’t be silly,” snapped Olive, really cross. “Miss Rice, if Mr Owen can’t be a little bit sensible, who is Lord Newdagonby?”

  “One of our directors,” Miss Rice explained. “Very rich and important and all that. His daughter is the Miss Dagon, that’s the family name, who was in the news a year or two ago when she left a sisterhood she had joined because she said she had found there was nothing to religion. She’s married now. I saw him put that necklace in your bag.”

  “What for?” asked Olive.

  “And I’m perfectly sure he wanted me to see him do it,” Miss Rice added.

  “Well, what for?” Olive persisted.

  “That,” said Bobby, “is what I would like to know. An attack of kleptomania? But that’s chiefly a feminine disease, and Miss Rice says she feels sure Lord Newdagonby wanted her to see what he was doing. Temporary insanity? But that only applies in cases of suicide.”

  “Temporary insanity indeed,” sniffed Miss Rice. “He’s all there all right, trust me.”

  “Because he wanted the thing but couldn’t afford to buy it?” Bobby went on. “But Miss Rice says he is a rich man. Where does he get his money from? Do you know, Miss Rice?”

  “Stock Exchange,” Miss Rice explained. “He is always buying and selling, and always at a profit.”

  “Oh, come, not always,” Bobby protested incredulously.

  “Well, that’s what they say,” Miss Rice persisted. “He has a flair.”

  This silenced Bobby, because, though he had no idea what the word meant, he knew that he himself had been credited with having it—much to his surprise.

  “What’s a flair?” asked Olive, also curious to know what this strange thing was that her man was said to possess.

  “I think it means being always right,” Miss Rice explained.

  “Then I certainly haven’t got it,” declared Bobby, much relieved.

  “They say,” Miss Rice went on, “that a college at Oxford or somewhere was very hard up, so they asked him, because he had been there, and he said: ‘How much do you want?’ and they said: ‘All we can get,’ and he said, ‘Would fifty thousand do?’ and they said: ‘Very nicely,’ so he said he would send them a cheque after next settling day, and he did.”

  “Just like that?” asked Bobby.

  “Just like that,” repeated Miss Rice firmly. “All out of Stock Exchange dealings.”

  “Very nice, too,” said Bobby, much impressed. “Talk about giving to airy nothings a local habitation and a cheque book.” Both the ladies looked as if they wondered what he was talking about. He went on, rather hurriedly: “How about drifting along to the jewellery department and seeing if they’ve missed any odd pearl necklaces recently?”

  Thither accordingly the three of them drifted, if that can be called drifting which was in fact one long, stern fight against a whirling tide of opposing currents. However, finally they reached their destination, a little breathless but otherwise not much the worse for wear. There they found a very perturbed young lady. Yes, Lord Newdagonby had been there. He had wanted to see some of their good-class imitation pearl necklaces. He had asked that three of them should be kept out of the showcase while he
went to find his friend for her to make her choice. He would be back in less than a minute, he said, but in fact had not been seen since. She, the young lady in charge of the counter, was most emphatic that she had never taken her eyes off the three necklaces for one single second. All the same, one had disappeared, and what had happened to it she couldn’t think. But if the firm wanted her to pay for it she couldn’t and wouldn’t, so there.

  Bobby relieved her fears by producing the one found in Olive’s handbag. This she at once identified, since the price ticket was still attached. Bobby told her he would have to keep it for the present, but gave her a receipt for it, and then allowed his thoughts to wander in the direction of lunch. Olive protested against wasting time in eating that could be devoted to bargain hunting. Bobby said simply that he was at the point of death from sheer exhaustion. A little alarmed lest this might be true, Olive yielded. Bobby said gloomily that he supposed by now there would be a queue all round the restaurant lounge and back again. Miss Rice at once offered to fix that for them. Olive said, “Oh, thank you so much,” before Bobby had time to voice a high-minded refusal to take advantage of such gross, back-stairs influence. So instead he followed, silently protestant but also very hungry, to a table specially provided for them.

  “Yes, but, Bobby, what does it mean?” Olive asked, as they settled themselves in their places and smugly surveyed that interminable queue, hungry, patient, well trained, at the tail end of which they should now, by all the canons of justice, be taking their stand. “It all,” said Olive, musing over a very satisfactory menu, “it all seems so silly. I do hope they know how to make decent coffee here.”