Brought to Light: A Bobby Owen Mystery Read online

By 1952, however, 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 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.”

  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 ca
lled “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

  APPEAL FOR HELP

  DEPUTY COMMANDER BOBBY OWEN, C.I.D., his hands in his pockets, whistling very badly the latest popular tune from the latest American musical, was looking out of a window of the West Mercian police headquarters in the pleasant little country town of Penton, once upon a time the capital of the kingdom of Mercia, but now not even the capital of the county. That distinction had been basely stolen by some upstart of a place in East Mercia, not more than six or seven hundred years old, at a time when Penton was still recovering from having been burnt down once or twice during the wars of the barons. And what the Deputy Commander was thinking as he gazed absently into a street where Tudor, Stuart, and even earlier buildings rubbed shoulders with the latest multiple-store buildings in the latest fashionable style was that when he became a policeman he had never expected to become a schoolmaster as well.

  Recently he had been giving a course of three lectures to the West Mercian police, basing them largely on the Howe edition of Gross’s Criminal Investigation. Members of neighbouring police forces had been invited to attend, and had done so in large numbers. There had been discussions following each lecture, and finally Major Rowley, West Mercian Chief Constable, had offered small money prizes for the three best essays on these Bobby Owen lectures.

  To this offer the response had been almost embarrassing in its plenitude, and as Major Rowley had not wished to adjudicate himself, for fear of being thought to show bias towards his own men, he had asked Bobby Owen to undertake the task. So here Bobby was, playing schoolmaster, as he told himself, trying to mark fairly what were in effect examination papers, and more than a little worried by the unfamiliar task, since on its competent performance so much depended for the essayists. Not so much, of course, on account of the monetary value of the small prizes offered, as because success would mean better prospects of promotion in a service in which promotion is often slow and difficult.

  And very difficult Bobby was finding it to penetrate both behind the stiff and formal official language too many of the men had been trained to use, and also behind the difficulty others found in expressing themselves. Yet only thus could be formed a clear estimate of the degree of clarity of thought and grasp of essential principles lying nearly smothered beneath turgid language and muddled syntax.

  Now, as he was turning back from the window to resume his task, there came a knock at the door, and Major Rowley appeared with an apology for an interruption which as a matter of fact Bobby welcomed rather than otherwise. The Chief Constable was a brisk, energetic man, of middle age, but still something of an all-round athlete, slightly below average height, but of square, strong build, with a quick, glancing eye that missed little, and a prominent nose above a firmly closed mouth. Behind him were many years of police service in India. He had the name of being a strict disciplinarian—too much so, indeed, in days when the emphasis has passed from demanding obedience to winning cooperation. Bobby had, however, found him pleasant to work with, appreciative of the lectures delivered, and, as Bobby knew, he had the reputation of having considerably improved the efficiency of the force he commanded.

  “Getting on all right?” he asked, with an approving glance at a desk where the piles of essays were evidently being sorted out into groups of differing merit.

  “More or less,” Bobby answered, still slightly worried by his unfamiliar task. “I’ve weeded out about half that I don’t think amount to much. I don’t know if you would care to look through them yourself and see if you think any of them should have another reading?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Rowley answered. “I want to be able to say I’ve had nothing to do with the judging.” He began to fidget in an awkward and rather embarrassed manner with the piled-up essays on the desk. “There’s a local big-wig here,” he said. “He wants to know if you can spare time to see him. I had to promise to ask. No confidence in country bumpkins like us. He wants the pure milk of Scotland Yard.”

  “Well, he can’t have it, that’s all,” declared Bobby, well aware of all the work waiting for him in London. “There’s a discipline board I’ve got to attend as well as the newest re-organization committee. Who is he, anyway?”

  Major Rowley countered by another question.

  “Ever heard of Stephen Asprey?” he asked. “You know that thing of his: ‘In gold and sumptuous velvet go the stars’? Always being quoted.”

  “Oh, is that his?” exclaimed Bobby, surprised. “I always thought it was Shakespeare or somebody. I remember Asprey was all the go when I was up at Oxford. Hadn’t heard much about him lately. Dead, isn’t he? Where does he come in?”

  “Mr Day-Bell,” the Major went on, reverting now to Bobby’s earlier question, “is the clergyman at Hillings-under-Moor, about ten or twelve miles from here. On the fringe of the Great Mercian Moor and a scattered, lonely sort of place. Janet Merton lived near there, and she is buried in Hillings churchyard.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” Bobby exclaimed, as old memories began to return to him. “They were lovers, weren’t they? Asprey and her. Isn’t there some story about Asprey having put their love-letters in her coffin to be buried with her?”

  “All his last poems, too, according to one version,” Rowley said. “I don’t think that’s known for certain, but it is certain that he wrote to her continually when they were apart, and that he published nothing during those years, though he used to say Janet had rekindled his Muse and the world would one day know what it owed her. There’s always been a good deal of talk about reopening the grave and recovering the letters and manuscripts if they are really there, and recently it’s been revived. There was a question about it in Parliament, and the Home Secretary said the request would receive favourable consideration if application were made.”

  “Well, then, that’s all right, isn’t it?” Bobby asked. “If the Home Office gives permission that’s all that’s necessary.”

  “Not quite all,” Rowley explained. “The grave is the freehold of the Merton family, and is now in the name of Miss Christabel Merton. She’s a niece of Janet Merton’s, and she says she will never agree to its opening. It was what they wanted and they loved each other, and she won’t have her aunt’s resting-place disturbed. Mrs Asprey—Asprey’s widow—backs her up, and she’s a formidable old lady.”

  “I don’t see what say she has from the legal point of view,” Bobby remarked, “but Miss Christabel is clearly within her rights. Nothing doing if she holds out. What’s Mr Day-Bell worrying about? He’s the Vicar, didn’t you say?”

  “He seems to think,” Major Rowley answered, “that attempts may be made to open the grave one night—without permission.”

  “Well, of course, that would be illegal,” Bobby pointed out. “Fine or imprisonment. Or is it only a fine? I forget. And of course anything taken from the grave would have to be returned, if Miss Merton insisted. At least, I suppose so. Anyhow, it’s Mr Day-Bell’s responsibility if he’s the Vicar.”

  “No, priest-in-charge, I think they call it, or curate-in-charge, or something like that,” the Major corrected him. “The last Rector, not Vicar—a Mr Thorne—disappeared about two years ago. He left the rectory one night for what he told his housekeeper was to be an evening stroll before bed. He has never been seen or heard of since. The Bishop put Mr Day-Bell in charge after a time, but I gather there are legal difficulties in the way of declaring the benefice vacant. Parson’s freehold, you know, and his daughter has started legal proceedings in restraint. She claims that her father may return, that his absence may not be voluntary, that there is no proof of wilful neglect and that if he returns and proves his absence was by force majeure, then the Bishop would have acted ultra vires.”

  “A jolly little legal fight on hand, I can see that,” Bobby agreed. “Lawyers’ idea of a fun fair, I should say. W
ho is fighting it? Costs will run pretty high, won’t they?”

  “It’s Mr Thorne’s daughter,” Rowley explained. “She’s married and a practising barrister, and so is her husband. The Hillings living is one of the best endowed in the country. In the sixteenth century a pasture field was left to the parish for ever, and it’s where all this part of the High Street has been built. Ground rents run high, and she doesn’t mean to let all that money go out of the family if she can help. And I daresay the case is quite a useful advertisement for her. Gets her well known to solicitors.”

  “Nothing ever found to explain Thorne’s disappearance?”

  “Nothing definite. Lots of gossip, of course. He was rather heavily in debt. He had lost a packet, speculating on the Stock Exchange. There were hints that he had got himself compromised with some woman who vanished about the same time. Nothing ever proved, but he had got the name of being inclined to be a little too friendly with some of his women parishioners. And suggestions that he had opened the Janet Merton grave on the quiet and gone off with what was buried with her.”

  “Good lord!” Bobby exclaimed. “The thing’s opening out all right. But what for? What good would the buried poems be to him? He couldn’t make any use of them. If he did, he would have to explain how he got hold of them.”

  “Well, that’s another angle again,” Major Rowley explained, though hesitatingly. “It’s not so much Asprey’s last poems, though some of these high-brow johnnies talk as if recovering them would be like recovering a lost play by Shakespeare. It’s the letters—those he wrote to Janet during their intimacy. There’s reason to think there’s a lot in them about his friendship with the young Duchess of Blegborough. If you remember, she died from what was said to be an overdose of sleeping tablets. It was all very much hushed up. The verdict at the inquest was ‘Death by Misadventure’. Probably her husband didn’t want it brought in as suicide. Natural enough if that were all, but—well, ugly stories got about that the Duke knew a good deal more than he said at the inquest; and that others knew still more, but were frightened or bribed into keeping their mouths shut.”