The Secret Search: A Bobby Owen Mystery Read online

  E.R. Punshon

  The Secret Search

  “There’s a spot of trouble this morning. Old gentleman found dead in his bath.”

  Bobby answered: “there may be one chance in a million it’s natural death.”

  When the notorious gangster Cy King was imprisoned thanks to Commander Bobby Owen’s investigation, he spent a good deal of time talking about avenging himself. Now Cy’s out of jail, linked to a notorious London nightclub owner, while a man impersonating Bobby has been spotted snooping around in a remote London suburb. The same suburb, as it happens, where a young woman, recently arrived from Canada, has seemingly vanished into thin air. All Bobby’s investigations lead to the unassuming borough of Southam, where the disappearance of Elizabeth Smith is compounded by the sudden death of a respectable old man. Cy keep dodging around in the background of the case, but can Bobby bring it home to the old villain – or find an alternative solution?

  The Secret Search, a classic golden age whodunit, is the twenty-eighth novel in the Bobby Owen Mystery series, originally published in 1951. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans, and a selection of E.R. Punshon’s prolific Guardian reviews of other golden age mystery fiction.

  “What is distinction? … in the works of Mr. E.R. Punshon we salute it every time.” DOROTHY L. SAYERS

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page/About the Book

  Contents

  Introduction by Curtis Evans

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  E.R. Punshon – Crime Fiction Reviewer

  About the Author

  The Bobby Owen Mysteries

  The Golden Dagger – Title Page

  The Golden Dagger – Chapter I

  Copyright

  Detective Stories, the Detection Club and Death: The Final Years of E. R. Punshon

  . . . but, they dead,

  Death has so many doors to let out life,

  I will not long survive them.

  The Custom of the Country (c. 1619-23; 1647)

  JOHN FLETCHER AND PHILLIP MASSINGER

  WHEN IN 1949 E.R. Punshon published So Many Doors, his twenty-sixth Bobby Owen detective novel, the Englishman was seventy-seven years old, with nearly a half-century of published novels behind him and a comparatively scant seven years of life and letters remaining before him. 1901, the year of the appearance of Punshon’s first novel, Earth’s Great Lord, saw the death of Queen Victoria, the long reigning granddaughter of King George III for whom a regal age of European global dominion has been named; while 1949, a year during which a convalescent Europe was still bleakly recovering from a world war that had reduced much of its civilization to ashes and rubble, saw the testing by the USSR of its first atomic bomb and the proclamation of the formation of the People’s Republic of China. The world was changing with a fearsome fleetness that not merely old men who had first glimpsed light in the Victorian era were finding hard to follow.

  Rapidly changing too was the craft of crime and mystery fiction that E.R. Punshon had long practiced (this admittedly a minor thing compared to unsettling phenomena like armed revolution and atom splitting). Like the once seemingly imperishable British Empire, the hegemony of the between-the-wars “Golden Age” clue-puzzle detective novel was breaking asunder, under pressure from increasingly popular rival forms of mystery fiction, such as hard-boiled, noir, psychological suspense and espionage. Already stalked by Raymond Chandler’s famous gumshoe, Philip Marlowe, as well as ill-humored and hard-drinking would-be Marlowe doppelgangers like Mickey Spillane’s brutish Mike Hammer, Punshon’s well-born English policeman Bobby Owen, along with other of his surviving gentlemanly detective colleagues from the era of classic crime fiction, soon found himself in the sights of no less deadly a professional killer than James Bond. Agent 007’s creator, Ian Fleming, who cited as his literary influences Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Eric Ambler and Graham Greene, published his first Bond spy novel, Casino Royale, in the United Kingdom in 1953, where it enjoyed immediate popular and critical success. In the United States, where the novel appeared in 1954, the same year as Raymond Chandler’s much-lauded The Long Goodbye, Time magazine wryly declared that “Bond . . . might well be [Philip] Marlowe’s younger brother, except that he never takes coffee for a bracer, just one large martini laced with vodka.”

  Upon the publication of So Many Doors in the UK and the US (in the latter country it would prove the last Punshon mystery published during the author’s lifetime), crime fiction reviewers deemed the novel and its author representatives of a vanished era. “The twenties were the plotter’s heyday (consider Freeman Wills Crofts, J.J. Connington, Dorothy L. Sayers),” observed the Democratic-Socialist London Tribune in its review of the “well-plotted” and “studiously told” So Many Doors, “and to the twenties, in spirit at least, belongs Mr. Punshon.” In the United States, Anthony Boucher, dean of American mystery critics, allowed in the New York Times Book Review that the narration of So Many Doors was “leisurely”; yet, after noting the seventeenth-century English stage derivation of the novel’s title, he approvingly added that there “is something Elizabethan, even Jacobean, about the obscure destinies that drive [Punshon’s] obsessed and tormented characters, and about the frightful violence that concludes the story.” Punshon, it seemed, still had something to say in the harried and hectic atomic age, when crime fiction reviewers and readers alike seemed increasingly to believe that brevity was the soul of death.

  * * * * *

  To his death in 1956 E.R. Punshon maintained a loyal following in the United Kingdom among readers who staunchly adhered to the strict standard of fair play puzzle plotting associated with Golden Age detective fiction. During the Fifties the aging but seemingly indefatigable author, who still lived quietly with his wife Sarah at their house at 23 Nimrod Road, Streatham, produced, through the medium of his prestigious longtime publisher Victor Gollancz, nine new mystery titles--Everybody Always Tells (1950), The Secret Search (1951), The Golden Dagger (1951), The Attending Truth (1952), Strange Ending (1953), Brought to Light (1954), Dark Is the Clue (1955), Triple Quest (1955) and Six Were Present (1956)—that detailed the final criminal investigations of his longtime series police detective, Bobby Owen, now risen to the august rank of Commander (unattached), Metropolitan Police. Additionally Punshon continued to remain active in his cherished Detection Club, a London-based social organization of distinguished detective novelists, in which the author had been inducted, along with Anthony Gilbert and Gladys Mitchell, in 1933, three years after the Club
’s founding, joining such luminaries from the crime writing world as G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, E.C. Bentley, Anthony Berkeley, R. Austin Freeman and Freeman Wills Crofts.

  Like other British institutions the Detection Club from 1939 to 1945 bore the bitter burdens of war, including the devastating Nazi air raids known collectively as “the Blitz.” When the Club revived its meetings and annual dinners in 1946, it became immediately apparent that time had wrought cruel changes with its membership. On seeing his brother and sister detective novelists again at the Club premises after the long interval of war years, John Dickson Carr, a comparative stripling at the age of forty, recalled that he had been “shocked” by their appearance, which he had found decidedly “greyer and more worn.”

  By 1946 eight of the original twenty-eight Detection Club members, including G.K. Chesterton, R. Austin Freeman and Helen Simpson, had passed away and many other members were now elderly and inactive. Several more members would expire over the next few years. Even the formerly quite engaged Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode (Cecil John Charles Street), now in their sixties and living in the country, became markedly less involved with Club affairs, as did an increasingly infirm Henry Wade (the landed baronet Henry Lancelot Aubrey-Fletcher). For his part, John Dickson Carr, deeming British life under postwar conditions and the governance of the Labour party intolerable, would in 1948 depart for his native United States. Besides Punshon, only Christie, John Rhode and Henry Wade, among original members, and Anthony Gilbert, Gladys Mitchell, Margery Allingham, John Dickson Carr, Nicholas Blake, Christopher Bush and E.C.R. Lorac, among the smaller number of Thirties inductees, remained substantially active as crime writers into the 1950s. Of these Lorac and Wade, like Punshon, would not survive the decade, and another, John Rhode, would barely outlast it.

  Clearly some new blood was badly needed. During Punshon’s remaining span of life the aged and ailing Detection Club received transfusions, so to speak, from seventeen new members. Although with the deaths of Baroness Emma Orczy and A.E.W. Mason (in 1947 and 1948 respectively), Punshon became the oldest surviving member of the Detection Club, the author, who served as Club treasurer between 1946 and 1949, during the postwar years remained extensively involved in Club affairs, actively participating in hearty debates concerning prospective new members, like Christianna Brand, Michael Innes, Michael Gilbert, Elizabeth Ferrars and Julian Symons, as to whether or not they practiced fair play and sufficiently respected the King’s (later Queen’s) English, the Club’s chief requirements for induction. (These debates are chronicled in detail in my CADS booklet Was Corinne’s Murder Clued? The Detection Club and Fair Play, 1930-1953.)

  In 1949 Punshon found himself at odds over the matter of new enrollments with the man who unquestionably was the Club’s crankiest and most cantankerous member: Anthony Berkeley, famed author of The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1928) and, under the pseudonym Francis Iles, of Malice Aforethought (1931) and Before the Fact (1932), three of the best regarded British crime novels from the Golden Age. In April Berkeley wrote a provocative letter to Punshon in which he claimed that as the Club’s “First Freeman” he possessed blanket veto power over prospective members, despite the fact that he no longer served on the membership committee. During the early days of the Detection Club, Berkeley had observed at a meeting that the Club had two “Freemans” as members (R. Austin Freeman and Freeman Wills Crofts), and he pronounced that as the person who had originally suggested forming the Club he would be its “First Freeman.” To this suggestion everyone else had laughingly assented, taking the office as a joke; yet now, nearly two decades later, it seemed that Berkeley had not been joking.

  Incensed by Berkeley’s gambit and the rude language in which he had couched it, Punshon wrote Sayers, enclosing his antagonist’s “offensive” letter (which evidently has not survived) and warning that “[Berkeley] intends to make some sort of fuss.” Punshon speculated that “possibly it is better to take no notice [of the letter], except perhaps as regards the absurd claim of his to hold some special position as what he calls ‘First Freeman.’ I have a vague idea that once before he put forward a claim to be a permanent member of the [membership] committee on the same ground.” He noted dryly that while he had forborne responding to the specifics of Berkeley’s letter, he had sent the notoriously tightfisted “First Freeman” a reminder that his annual membership fee was due, to which he had received no reply.

  “Bother AB!” responded Sayers in a letter to Punshon that she composed the day after receiving his missive. “I do wish he was not so rude and silly.” She entirely concurred with Punshon’s recollection of the once comical but now rather annoying office of First Freeman and added resignedly: “If he tries to make a fuss at the meeting, the committee will have to cope; but I hope he will have more sense. I am sorry he should have written to you so impertinently.”

  By the summer of 1949 the First Freeman’s irksome machinations had been checked--but only, Punshon feared, for the moment. With considerable skepticism Punshon wrote Sayers, “I gather the reconciliation with Anthony Berkeley is now complete and the hatchet well and truly buried. Until dug up again.” Sayers, who soon would succeed E.C. Bentley as President of the Detection Club, advised members to tread carefully around Berkeley’s tender sensibilities. “Let a (more or less) sleeping Berkeley lie,” she urged. Nevertheless Sayers agreed with Punshon that the Club members would have to keep Berkeley off the membership committee, because were he to be on it the Club would “never get any new member . . . he turns them all down on sight.” She lamented that “Berkeley is a difficult man to work with.”

  Sayers found working with Punshon, whose detective fiction she had enthusiastically promoted as a book reviewer for the Sunday Times between 1933 and 1935, to be an altogether more pleasant experience. Surviving correspondence between the two authors suggests that Punshon was, along with Anthony Gilbert (Lucy Beatrice Malleson), the Detection Club member with whom Sayers got along most amicably at this time. The two communicated fairly frequently during the postwar years, chatting not only about Detection Club matters, but more personal affairs as well.

  As treasurer of the Detection Club, Punshon gave his attention to matters large--such as any taxes the Club might have to pay to a revenue-hungry British government (“we have to remember that we may be dropped on by the Income tax people”)—and matters small. As an example of the latter, Punshon advised Sayers in December 1948 that the Club should give a “small Christmas present” to Mrs. Buchanan, caretaker of the Club premises at 12 Kingly Street, Soho. (“A room and loo in a clergy house,” Christianna Brand bluntly recalled of the locale.) Although payment for services was included with the rent, Punshon pointed out that “services included are very often badly neglected and so far as I have noticed in this case they have been quite well carried out and the room always seemed neat and tidy.” “[E]ven in this sordid age,” he reflected with characteristic gentle irony, “a few thanks and expressions of satisfaction . . . often please as much as gifts—at any rate if accompanied by a gift.” A few days later Sayers gave Mrs. Buchanan a £1 Christmas tip (about £32 today).

  Sadly, Punshon suffered a serious setback to his health in August 1949, not long after a busy summer that saw the English publication of So Many Doors, his nettlesome skirmish with Anthony Berkeley and the annual Detection Club dinner at the Hotel Café Royal, Piccadilly. (Recorded treasurer Punshon of the latter event: “L87/9/9—Miss Gilbert paid L6/9/4 for after dinner drinks. I gave the head waiter L1. Total 95/9/1. Great success.”) After writing Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode to inform them about the Berkeley brouhaha, Punshon went into hospital for an operation. In September Sayers wrote Punshon that she was pleased to hear from his wife that he was “making a really good convalescence,” adding: “We will miss you greatly at the October meeting, but of course you must have a good long holiday and get quite fit.”

  By early November Punshon, recuperating at Christopher Bush’s house, Little Ho
rsepen, near Rye in East Sussex, was able to report that he was “very much better,” though the same month he resigned as Detection Club treasurer. (Christopher Bush succeeded him to the office.) Later that month Punshon wrote Sayers from Bournemouth, where he was taking a “long rest.” He wished her good fortune with the recently published Penguin paperback edition of her translation of Dante’s Inferno, remarking, “I don’t know any translation of Dante except the old one [1805] by [Henry Francis] Cary, and that was a fairly pedestrian performance.” He also heaped praise on Penguin’s ambitious paperback publishing scheme, deeming it a “very praiseworthy attempt to turn us into a nation of book buyers instead of borrowers. A Real Revolution—if they can bring it off.” Punshon had particular reason to applaud Penguin’s effort, as the previous year the company had issued a pair of 1930s Bobby Owen mystery titles as paperbacks. (Three more titles would follow in the next half-dozen years.)

  Punshon remained active in Detection Club affairs in 1950, though he urged that Michael Gilbert be tapped to replace him on the membership committee. “Would [Anthony Berkeley] take the suggestion as an insult,” he sarcastically queried Sayers, obviously still smarting over the events of the previous year. Punshon also participated in evaluations of the work of proposed new member Julian Symons (1912-1994), one of Britain’s new wave of consciously self-styled “crime writers.” Of Symons’s recent Bland Beginning (1949), a novel based, as was Punshon’s own Comes a Stranger (1938), on the Thomas J. Wise literary forgery scandal, Punshon wrote Sayers, “On the whole I should be inclined to say ‘yes,’ even though I think the character drawing deplorable and the construction and final explanation a bit shaky. But he does manage to produce a readable story and it is certainly an intelligent and clever book.”

  By 1952, Punshon’s health had declined to the point where he felt unable to attend the Detection Club’s annual dinner. “[A]s they used to say in the war, the situation on the (health) front has deteriorated,” he mordantly wrote Sayers, adding ominously that he had scheduled an “appointment with a specialist.” The next year, however, both he and his wife, now octogenarians, managed to make it to the dinner, much to the pleasure of Sayers, who promised, “you shan’t be bothered with the [initiation] ceremony at all—there will be plenty of people to carry candles.” Sayers promised the Punshons good seats at the High Table to hear philosopher Bertrand Russell speak, and in a contemporary letter Christianna Brand somewhat cattily reported observing Mrs. Punshon sitting “terribly close to the speakers so as not to miss a word, and sound asleep.”