The Policeman Cometh

"The true work, it is done from within. The little grey cells – remember always the little grey cells, mon ami."

- Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie's The Murder on the Links, 1923)

Previously, I reviewed a mystery novel set in colonial Kenya and a collection of holiday-themed detective stories, which seemed like a fun theme to explore further and there happened to be a sundry of mysteries on my pile of unread books that would lend themselves to that end – such as the fittingly titled subject of this blog-post.

Murder Abroad (1939) is the thirteenth novel from E.R. Punshon's series of detective stories about Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen and was hauled from the bowels of obscurity by the Dean Street Press. As to be expected, genre-historian and professional mystery addict, Curt Evans, wrote an insightful introduction in which he pointed out that the plot of the story was "partially based on a then notorious unsolved crime" – a case that became "a press sensation" with "accounts of the affair appearing in newspapers around the world." It added an extra layer of depth to an already compelling and involved detective story.

Bobby Owen is engaged to Olive Farrar, owner of a West End hat shop, but his modest police salary and her meager earnings are hardly sufficient to found a household upon. Providentially, one of Farrar's dependable, socially-connected customers, Lady Markham, has a proposal for them that would net them enough money to get married. What does the proposal entail?

Lady Markham had a sister, Miss Polthwaite, who was living the life of an artiste-peintre in Citry-sur-l'eau, a picturesque village in the French Auvergne, but her seemingly quiet, peaceful existence was cut short when her body was retrieved from the bottom of a nearby well – a paintbrush was clasped in her hand and a picture was found on her easel.

Local authorities washed their hands from the affair and shelved the matter as a tragic case of suicide. However, the family believes she was murdered and the police admitted as much in private, but refused to state their suspicions openly "for fear of harming the tourist trade." A fear supported by a potential motive that's applicably to nearly everyone in the district: Miss Polthwaite was an eccentric bird and believed a revolution was on the horizon, "with guillotines in Trafalgar Square and everyone with any money shot at dawn," which is why she began to convert her money into diamonds – mainly uncut stones. Only problem is the police were unable to find any of them in the refurbished mill she was living in and her family is convinced she has hidden them somewhere on the premise.

If Bobby can find the stones, he earns himself an eight thousand pound finder's fee and Lady Markham has promised to use her influence to get him appointed as the private secretary of their local chief constable. So he finds himself on a "sort of a threefold mission," as he's asked to find the diamonds, the murderer and the truth, which has to do in an unofficial capacity and in the guise of a sketch-artist of the amateurish kind. But he has to do so in order to secure his future with Olive and soon finds himself descending on the unsuspected citizenry of the French village.

The detective work in Murder Abroad consists largely of talking to the locals and fellow visitors to the region, but Punshon provided Bobby with a palette of truly colorful characters. They make for "a formidable list of possibles."

One of the first people Bobby exchanges opinions with is the local schoolmaster, Eudes, who's a rabid anti-clerical communist and very eager to secure funds "to establish a journal of liberty and enlightenment." Diametrically opposed to him is Abbé Granges, Curé of Citry-sur-l'eau, who has wild dreams of restoring both the church and the faith of the villagers to its former glory. But he's not the only man of the cloth residing in the area: the hill-tops of the village have become the home of Abbé Taylour and there are whispered rumors of him being an excommunicated priest, but his presence seems to have no bearing on the death that took place in the valley below. The person favored by the villagers to fulfill the role of murderer is young Charles Camion, son of the proprietor of the local hotel, rumored to have been the lover of the dead woman and "needed money to realize ambitions Miss Polthwaite had herself aroused," but they were also overhead having a violent exchange of words. She might have refused to give him the money and as an answer he might have shoved her down the well. There is another young man, Henry Volny, who is the son of a wealthy farmer, but his father keeps him on a short leash and refused to pay for his dream of becoming a professional boxer. Volny was also a rival of Camion for the affection of a local girl.

Further more, there are several of Bobby's compatriots in the vicinity: Basil Shields is an artist who acted as the dead woman's art teacher and her renovated mill-house has been let to a Mr. and Mrs. Williams – who seem to be everything but reputable folks.

Finally, there is, arguably, the best and finest drafted character from the cast: a blind beggar, named Père Trouché, who heard so well that people doubted his blindness. I think Punshon missed a golden opportunity here to introduce a secondary detective to his repertoire, because Trouché would have shined in the role of a blind, homeless and disreputable detective character roaming the French countryside. Sadly, we have to settle for his memorable performance in this story and the great, but sad, sendoff he got towards the end of the story.

Anyway, a significant portion of the story consists of Bobby having conversations with this motley bunch of characters, which slowly expose the "many currents and cross-currents at work" in the once quiet and peaceful village – many of them "resulted from the Polthwaite tragedy." Bobby also spends time sketching and when his tired brain refuses to work he took long, tiring walks across "the slopes of the Bornay Massif." He also observes in these moments that playing detective is a lot easier when done in an official capacity with a machine, like Scotland Yard, at your back.

So this is genuinely a detective story with a strong, well-conceived holiday atmosphere, but the conversational plot, the brief excursions across the French hillsides and Punshon's wordy, decorative writing-style also gave Murder Abroad a pace similar to that of quiet, slow-moving mountain stream – which suddenly begins to rush violently towards the end of the story and places Bobby in precarious position. I've no doubt that this part of the story will cause some confusion, because there's a hoard of characters who apparently wanted to be in on the action and there's a moment where it's not clear who's responsible for what. However, the confusion is quickly dispelled and it becomes clear as to what happened to whom, but the best part of these final chapters is a very unusual scene involving the final moments of one of the characters. It's something you would expect from the very unorthodox Gladys Mitchell (e.g. Tom Brown's Body, 1949).

Anyhow, I have prattled on long enough and I'll end this reviewing by saying that Murder Abroad is a perfect read for the summer holidays, because the plot and story requires the reader to have several hours of leisure to stroll (not race) across its many pages and chapters.

Well, I have one or two more of these foreign-set, holiday-themed mysteries on the pile, but the next one will be a much lighter (and probably faster) read than this one. So you can probably expect the next review before the end of this week. Stay tuned!  

Death Has No Friends

"I mean they were not even normal murders... the man who is hounding us all to death is a hell-hound, and his power is from hell."

- Mr. Arnold Aylmer (G.K. Chesterton's The Incredulity of Father Brown, 1926)

The Bath Mysteries (1936) is the seventh entry in E.R. Punshon's Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen series, which has an indefinable plot patterned after the infamous "Brides in the Bath Murders" from the 1910s and offered a brief glimpse at Owen's aristocratic side of the family – one of them who died under suspicious circumstances.

Bobby Owen is summoned to the ancestral seat of his kin and the opening chapter finds him assessing the place's "interminable and depressing length," which has become unaffordable as a permanent residence, but the reason for his summons had nothing to do with the family coffers. It concerns one of his cousins, Ronald "Ronnie" Owen, who vanished over three years ago.

The departure of Ronnie Owen coincided with a "disastrous and scandalous divorce case," after which "he had vanished from the ken of all his former friends and acquaintances," including Cora – his "justly offended wife." Owen seems to expect that Ronnie's drunken habit has finally caught up with him, but what is being revealed is far more serious and sinister than he could have possibly imagined. A woman who identified herself as the widow of man named Ronald Oliver, the presumed alias of Ronnie, pawned a signet ring that bore the family crest, which happened only a day after she collected 20,000 pounds from an insurance company. People had been murdered for far less in those days!

There is, however, one problem: the body of the man, who called himself "Ronald Oliver," died in a bathtub from "the effects of boiling water coming from a lighted geyser" that "pour continuously for a day and a half." He was boiled alive! The police assumed the victim wanted a bath to sober up and was overcome by the steam, which led to a verdict of "Death by Misadventure," but his actual widow, Cora, disagrees with this interpretation – believing he was murdered. So the family draws on their influence to put Bobby in charge of a discreet investigation.

It's not an easy or grateful task, because Bobby is fully aware that in an investigation "a time-lag of a few minutes is often of such importance as to make the difference between success and failure" and here there was an interval of months. And for "guilt there is no cloak like the lapse of time." However, that's not the only problem staring Bobby in the face: Ronnie had shuttered himself away in a small flat, cut off from his former life, which barely left anyone to interrogate.

A problem amplified when Bobby comes across several potential victims, lonely men "who had fallen or been thrown from their places in society" and "deliberately cut themselves entirely adrift," but, somehow, still had their lives insured for several thousands of pounds – which in those days amounted to a small fortune. It's not surprising Bobby begins to suspect he's up against "a kind of murder factory," but it's also where the book begins to diverge from your typical, 1930s Golden Age-style detective novel.

The plot of The Bath Mysteries is hard to define, because it consists of a lot of different elements: deceptively starting as a classic whodunit, but soon becoming more thriller-like with a conspiratorial nature that gives the story a sinister and unsettling touch. But underneath all of that, The Bath Mysteries is an early predecessor of the British police procedural. Instead of fretting about muddy footprints, cigarette buds and alibis, Bobby is pounding pavement and doing what looks like legitimate police-work, which can be experienced (when contrasted with the other elements) as dull and disappointing – because it's essentially routine police-work. There are also several characters who would feel quite at home in a modern-style crime novel by the likes of P.D. James or Reginald Hill: a woman trying to leave her life as a prostitute behind her, an ex-convict who mentally has never healed from a flogging he received in prison and an elderly, stick-fingered lady as old as she's experienced in evil. The book ends with these three characters as they find some redemption, which was a nice touch, but you have to read the book yourself to find out how.

Punshon really strayed away from the Golden Age here, but, from a historical perspective, it's an interesting predictive book that anticipated the crime novels and police procedurals of the post-World War II era. He did so in the mid-1930s! The only weakness is that he also anticipated that murderers would not be as well-hidden as they were during his days, which is a pity, but the upside is that the book can be used as lure to draw readers of contemporary crime stories to our side.

Speaking of historical content, The Bath Mysteries has one of the earliest references to the early days of television: Bobby is given a tour of a luxurious apartment and was "shown the television screen," but, "unfortunately," there was "no television programme on at the moment." You can watch a snippet of television from the year this book was published here. But I have prattled on long enough. I'll be back before long with a review of something slightly more orthodox. At least, I hope so. That was basically the plan when I picked up The Bath Mysteries to read.

Post Mortem

"The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic."

- Aristide Valentin (G.K. Chesterton's The Innocence of Father Brown, 1911)

Ever since its inception, The London-based Detection Club produced some interesting and experimental volumes of collaborative detective fiction, which consists mainly of round-robin novels (e.g. The Floating Admiral, 1932), but The Anatomy of Murder (1936) took a break from fictional crimes with plots constructed like an obstacle course. 

The Anatomy of Murder is a collection of true crime articles and cast the contributors in the role of armchair criminologists. It's a short who's who of the early Detection Club: Dorothy L. Sayers, E.R. Punshon, Helen Simpson, Margaret Cole and Anthony Berkeley – appearing here under his penname of "Francis Iles."

They're tasked with re-examining five infamous cases from the late 1800s and early twentieth century, but these literary exhumations consist mainly of going over the facts and consider their implications. So don't expect any mind-blowing, alternative explanations being spun from the giving facts. It's a dry and factual collection, but interesting from a historical perspective and a particular item of interest for avid consumers of true crime stories.

Note that I'll be keeping the case descriptions as short and summary as possible, because murderers operating outside of the printed page are generally unconcerned with creating a clear, straightforward and clue-filled plot – unlike their fictional counterparts. 

Helen Simpson wrote the first chapter, "Death of Henry Kinder," which could also have been titled "Crime in Australia" and is a textbook example of "an unsatisfactory crime" from "the point of view of a reader of detection stories."

Henry Kinder was a chief teller in the City Bank of Sydney and appeared respectable, but was very fond of hard liquor and his drinking habits had began to affect his health in the months preceding his death. On October 2nd, 1865, the news of Kinder's suicide startled many of his respectable friends in the city and a jury brought in a verdict death "by the discharge of a pistol with his own hand," but by that time the rumor mill had started – with subsequent events revealing Kinder may have been polished off with a dose of poison by his wife's lover. Henry Louis Bernard was put on trial and Simpson's report, peppered with diary entrants, letters and pieces of court transcripts, shows how the chain of events clanked "to a madman’s fandango," which lead to a very unsatisfactory conclusion.

Well, unsatisfactory if this had been a piece of fiction, but, as a criminal case from history, it demonstrated that even if the perceptive story book detectives had existed their singular talents be rendered pretty much useless in cases lacking their own clarity of mind. You can read an extensive description of the case here. 

Margaret Cole's penned the second chapter and deals with "The Case of Adelaide Bartlett," which is better known as the "Pimlico Mystery" and shares some similarities with the previous case: in both cases a spouse is fatally poisoned after a previous incident relegated them to a sick bed. In the case of Henry Kinder, it was an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, but in the 1886 death of Thomas Edwin Bartlett it was mercurial poisoning – which he claimed was self-ingested. However, it was not the poison that would end up killing him.

A month later, Bartlett passed away and a post-mortem examination revealed a fatal quantity of chloroform in his stomach. The inquest yielded a verdict of willful murder and Adeleide Bartlett was indicted, but acquitted under "immense cheering" in the courtroom. As Cole noted, it was one of the most interesting trials of its day, because it was not "a tale of horror or brutality." None of the people, however odd or foolish, were monsters and tried "to be as nice as impossible under rather difficult circumstances." It was an interesting study in characters and motives that were somewhat ahead of their time.

However, it must be noted as well that one of the main reason for acquittal was failing in providing an answer how the poison could've been administrated without a struggle, since chloroform burns, but Cole makes a valid suggestion based on the characteristics of the people involved – and had the jury considered this possibility "she would have never gone free." A very odd case to say the least.

Interestingly, Cole's account includes a list of nineteenth century medicines and remedies given to Thomas Bartlett after his mercurial poisoning, which did not sound very appetizing.

For the third chapter, E.R. Punshon gives "An Impression of the Landru Case," which deals with the "incredible reincarnation of the Bluebeard of the nursery tales." Henri Désiré Landru was one of the neatest and charming serial killers who ever stalked the European continent. Known as "The Bluebeard of Gambais," Landru operated "during that four-year feast of horror and of terror we remember as the war" and responsible for the complete disappearance of eleven people in such a manner "that nothing can be declared with certainty" – concluding that "no jury" would've brought in "a verdict of guilty" had "each case stood alone." It's an accumulation of those eleven disappearances in close proximity of Landru, a methodical kept notebook and a storage room with a "strange collection" of items "once the property of a woman who once had known Landru and now was known to none" that became his undoing.

Punshon sketches an interesting, but unsettling, picture of charming confidence man with the predatory nature of "Jack the Ripper," but with more self-control and enjoyed to play the game until the very end – which in Landru's instance was up to the moment he was lead to the guillotines. You almost have to admire the guts and brawn of such an imperturbable character, but I’m sure France could've used such talents elsewhere at that specific point in time.

Dorothy L. Sayers goes over one of the England's most infamous "unsolved" murder cases in it's criminal history, "The Murder of Julia Wallace," which has captured the imagination of several post-WWII crime-writers – including a couple of Golden Agers. The books it has inspired include George Goodchild and C.E. Bechhofer's The Jury Disagree (1934), Winifred Duke's Skin for Skin (1935), John Rhode's The Telephone Call (1948) and P.D. James' The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982).

You can understand why mystery writers tend to be intrigued, because if William Wallace was guilty of bludgeoning his wife to death "he was the classic contriver and alibi-monger that adorns the pages of a thousand mystery novels," but if he was innocent "then the real murderer was still more typically of the classic villain of fiction." Where do you begin to describe a case that includes all of the classic ingredients of a detective story: a blood-stained mackintosh, a mysterious phone call from a non-existent person calling himself "R.M. Qualtrough" and an apparent contrived alibi. Then there are the conflicting witness statements: such as a constable who assumed he saw Wallace crying in the streets, but the clients he met after this apparent encounter with the policeman reported he was his usual self.

It was a dark, murky and muddled case, but despite every scrap of evidence against Wallace being circumstantial, which included an exonerating testimony from the local milk delivery boy, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. However, Court of Criminal appeal quashed the verdict in what was at the time an unprecedented move, which left open that intriguing question: who killed Julia Wallace? This was easily my favorite chapter from the book.

Finally, Anthony Berkeley, writing as "Francis Iles," delivers the longest-written chapter from the book as he rides his hobbyhorse, called criminal psychology, across a hundred pages describing the sordid mess known as "The Rattenbury Case." I did not find the case as interesting as Berkeley, but I can understand why people interesting psychological crimes can rattle on about it for page-after-page: a middle-aged woman, Mrs. Rattenbury, living together with her much older husband and her very young lover in a villa, which leads to battering-death with a mallet. Probably not the best chapter to end the book on, but I'm sure there are readers out there, especially readers of psychological thrillers, who'll be as intrigued by chapter as I was by Wallace chapter.

Well, there you have it: five cases re-examined by members of the Detection Club. The cases have something of interest to offer, one way or another, but I think the main draw is that the articles/chapters were written by famous mystery writers from the Golden Age – rather than for the cases themselves. I think it would've been better if they re-examined unsolved cases and provided a possible solution, which was, after all, their job.

However, it was a good, historically interesting diversion from the fictional murders the authors usually reveled in, but I'll be returning to those fictional murders for the next review.

Heir Presumptive

"...we are a truthful family, only the things that happen to us are so peculiar that nobody ever believes in them. Still, I expect you've got a sort of winnowing ear for people's testimonies and will know in a flash if we try any hanky-panky."

- Henry Lamprey (Ngaio Marsh's Death of a Peer, 1941)

Ten Star Clues (1941) is the fifteenth novel with the emblem "A Bobby Owen Mystery" plastered on its cover, but the writing and plot is as elaborate, darkly humorous and fantastical as E.R. Punshon's earlier work in this series – which consists here of one long riff on the Victorian-era case of the Tichborne claimant.

It's also one of the most scrupulously plotted stories from the series and has a carefully constructed, decidedly linear narrative.

In the first quarter of book, Punshon introduces a cast of old-fashioned characters populating the historical Castle Wych, which is situated near the village of Brimsbury Wych.

The elderly Earl and Countess Wych stand at the head of the old Hoyle dynasty, who "for some hundreds of years had lived and flourished at Castle Wych," and own most, but "less now than formerly," of the surrounding land. However, since the days of robber barons and lucrative placeholder, running a centuries-old estate has become an unprofitable occupation. Ralph Hoyle is the heir to his great-uncle and had decided to dispose of the estate once he inherits the title, but a problem presents itself when a long-lost grandson of the Earl turns up on their doorstep.

Bertram Hoyle was presumed to have passed away a decade ago in the United States, but Earl and Countess Wych recognize and accept him as their grandson – securely placing him in the position of heir apparent. However, the Earl and Countess seem to be only family members who buy the story. But nobody appears willing to challenge the claim. Well, nobody except Ralph, who blatantly opposes the claim and calls his so-called cousin a fraud, which makes for an increasingly tense situation.

It makes for an uncomfortable and tense situation. A situation that becomes tense enough for someone to unload several cartridges from an automatic pistol in the library (where else?), but the identity of the victim is not as obvious you might expect.

Enter Inspector Bobby Owen and Chief Constable Glynne: who conduct a series of laborious interviews with the family, servants and several interested parties from the outside – such as one of the family lawyers and the local vicar. I have to mention here that the structure of the plot reminded me of a Ngaio Marsh's method of plotting, which often had a lead-up to the murder followed by a series of interviews by Inspector Roderick Alleyn. That's pretty much where the relevant comparisons ends, but I always associated this particular sequence with Marsh's mystery novels.

Anyhow, the interviews of the "people concerned were themselves all so striking and unusual in their different ways" and uncovers "a complicated interplay of characters and interests" – which allows Owen to compile two very important lists.

The first is a tabulation of "the Possibles," which consists of a nice and ordered list of suspects, motives and several pertinent questions, but it's the second list that'll be of main interest to most readers. A list of ten clues that Owen dubbed "star" clues and should help the reader with identifying the murderer. However, I should mention here that seasoned, experienced mystery readers and addicts will probably identify the murderer early on and work out the main lines of the plot long before coming across the list of clues. I immediately thought "what's this person up to" and "did this person just..." when the shots were fired, but that's hardly something that can be held against Punshon and shouldn't take anything away from this beautifully plotted Golden Age mystery.

Well, I know this review has been rather summary, but it's a difficult book to review in depth. I did not want to give away too much about the lead-up to the murder investigation and the second half consisted of a series of interviews, which do not lend themselves to the writing of descriptive, enticing reviews. That's why this review is both poor in details and writing.

So, I'll end this review by pointing out one of the aspects that attracts me to Punshon's work, which is what some view as a weakness in his work: namely his verbiage. Punshon was a very wordy writer, but it never annoyed me because expertly constructed plots and well-rounded characters accompanied it. It also gave the stories a strong sense of time-and place that stretched across the centuries. I simply appreciate it when there's a short, throwaway sentence that explained that a certain room in the castle had not witnessed a high-strung scene "since the early eighteenth century when a duel had been fought in it by candlelight." Or a character noting how his "remote, skin-clad ancestors would have felt so much more at home" in the surrounding, out-stretched forest than "he could ever be." That comes on top of the references World War I and the coming World War, which is in this book in the stages known as the Phony War.

As I said before, it gives the book a strong sense of time-and place, which I appreciate as much as a well constructed plot or a clever locked room mystery. Punshon never seems to disappoint in combining the first two (no locked rooms though) and that's why is becoming a personal favorite mine. 

Well, I'll try to pick a mystery for my next read that'll allow me to drawl on with a bit more substance. 

Previous reviews of Punshon's mysteries:

Crossword Mystery (1934)
Death Comes to Cambers (1935)
Comes a Stranger (1938) 

Ten Star Clues (1941) 

Where's the Body?

"You've been dreaming... bodies are always being found in libraries in books. I've never known a case in real life."

- Colonel Bantry (Agatha Christie's The Body in the Library, 1942)

Comes a Stranger (1938) is the eleventh mystery in E.R. Punshon's Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen series and belonged to a cluster of incredibly rare titles, which come with a three-or four digit prize-tag attached to them – resulting in a limited circulation among collectors on the secondhand book market. However, the key word here is "belonged."

Dean Street Press is going to reissue yet another batch of Bobby Owen novels, which are scheduled for release early next month. Our very own genre historian, Curt Evans, provided the introductions, but Comes a Stranger also has an interesting after word adding some historical annotations to the plot – as well as mentioning the work of other mystery writers that were inspired by the same event. But this part can't be mentioned without spoiling a vital element of the plot. So I won't. Luckily, there's more than enough material to drone on about between the pages of this book. 

In the book immediately preceding this one, Dictator's Way (1938), Bobby Owen followed in the footsteps of Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey and Ngaio Marsh's Inspector Roderick Alleyn by falling in love with one of the suspects: the lovely owner of chic London hat shop named Olive Farrar. Interestingly, Alleyn and Agatha Troy met in Artists in Crime (1938), which was published in the same year as Dictator's Way and Comes a Stronger, but nearly a decade behind Sayers' Strong Poison (1930) – a book that seems to have saved many detectives from the celibate life of Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown and Dr. John Thorndyke.

The engagement between Bobby Owen and Olive Farrar has come to the attention of Miss Kayne, an old acquaintance of the latter, who invited the couple to spend a week at her place in Wynton Village, which is also the home of the world-renowned Kayne Library.

Miss Kayne's late-father had spend years in building up the library and has acquired the illustrious reputation of being "the finest collection of books in private hands." It contains the "whole history of early European printing" and "the birth of European thought," which tell the story of "the growth of the human mind during those years" – making it a modern Library of Alexandria. Under the "careful and somewhat complicated will" of Miss Kayne's father, there's an assurance that the library is kept together. However, this pits the interest of several interested parties against each other.

A crabby, grouchy bibliographical scholar, Mr. Broast, presides over the famous library and loves to act as its owner, but under the will he's only an employee and has to deal with monthly inspections from the co-trustees of the library – Mr. Nathaniel "Nat" Kayne and Sir William Winders.

The former is Miss Kayne's cousin and he would love nothing more than to cash in one the library’s reputation by selling off the books to the University of Wales. The latter is a rival collector who was "part dearest friend and colleague" and "part deadliest enemy and hated and dreaded rival," who would leap at an opportunity to replace Mr. Broast with one of his own man.

Well, it's against this backdrop, in combination with a visit from a real-life Scotland Yard detective, that things begin to happen all of a sudden, which commences with a report that a body has been spotted in the library. I say spotted, because discovered isn't the right word.

There's an American gentleman, Bertram A. Virtue, who saw a blood-covered body of a man through the grated window of the library. However, a thorough examination of the library failed to uncover as much as a single drop of spilled blood, but, strangely enough, the report coincides with the discovery of a murdered man in a sunken lane in the surrounding woods – which was clearly murder going by the bullet holes in the body. 

Bobby Owen is allowed to stay on at the village to assist the local authorities and slowly, but surely, begins to unravel the case, which has many interesting, seemingly baffling aspects about it. Why did the description of the apparent non-existent body in the library match a photograph in possession of Mr. Broast's giggling secretary, Miss Perkins? Why did Bobby Owen receive a box filled with forgot-me-nots? Is there a personal motive for the murder or is it tied to printed treasures stored in the library? Does any of this pertain to the "perfect murder" Miss Kayne alluded to in a conversation with Owen? And would it have killed the murderer to take a couple of shooting lessons, before emptying an entire magazine in the second victim? That's just lazy and sloppy work.

Punshon ties the entire bundle of plot-threads together with the skill and grace one expects from a novelist, but also has the air of a researcher/bibliographical scholar as it has many tidbits about the history of the printing press, rare editions and book hunting – which is compared with the work of a detective. It gave the novel a character of its own.

So, in that regard, Comes a Stranger is an absolute must-read for fans of the so-called "bibliomysteries," but let the reader be warned: some scenes towards the end of the book might be considered trigger emotions of heavy dread. It's not what you think. It's much, much worse!

The only smudge on the overall plot (IMHO) was why the first (shooting) victim died and the lack of adequate clueing to that answer, which therefore became a rather cheap, somewhat unfair method to divert attention away from the murderer. There was more than enough in the book to compensate for this slight imperfection, but, as a bit of nitpicker, I was mildly annoyed considering the quality of the overall plot.  

Otherwise, I heartily welcome Comes a Stranger back into circulation. 

I'll be back soon with a review that, hopefully, wasn't slapped together by a sleep-deprived mind, but, in the meantime, you might want to be enticed by my previous reviews of

Punshon's Crossword Puzzle (1934) and Death Comes to Cambers (1935).

Some Kind of Monkey Business

"Why, the English countryside is one congealed mass of intrigue and petty spite. That is why almost every murder story is placed in a country town or in some remote village, where all the natural passions have free play."

- Miss Boddick (Stanley Casson's Murder by Burial, 1938)

On the back-cover of my Pan Books edition of Death Comes to Cambers (1935), Dorothy L. Sayers asks "what is distinction," which is not easy to define, but, instinctively, it's recognized in those few who achieved it and ascended to the first ranks.

Sayers asserts that we recognize it in the Sherlock Holmes canon, E.C. Bentley's Trent’s Last Case (1913), A.E.W. Mason's At the Villa Rose (1910), G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories and "in the works of Mr. E.R. Punshon we salute it every time" – which I tend to agree with after reading three of his detective novels.

Death Comes to Cambers has Punshon's series-character, Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen, staying as a guest at Cambers House. Lady Cambers has reasons to believe burglars are sneaking about the house, coveting her expensive collection of jewelry, but Owen soon finds himself engaged in a murder-investigation.

One morning, her ladyship fails to appear for breakfast and her bed hasn’t been slept in, which eventually leads to the discovery of her body on a damp, cold and trampled field just outside of the house – strangled to death! As to be expected, the centerpiece of Lady Cambers' collection, "Cleopatra's Pearl," is missing from her safe and there are signs someone had been staking out the house during the night. But robbery isn't the only possible motive for the murder.

Lady Cambers' husband, Sir Albert, wanted to separate from his wife, one way or another, in order to marry another woman. There's a nephew, Tim Sterling, who became her heir, but resented the way in which she wanted to run his life and bumping off his aunt would've brought freedom – in addition to a considerable lump of money.

A motive of a different nature comes from the local vicar, Mr. Andrews, who's a rabid creationist and objected fiercely to Lady Cambers financing an archeological excavation in Frost Field. Which is where her body was found. The excavations are being carried out by an equal fanatical and arrogant Darwinist, named Eddy Dene, who hoped his theory about the true genesis of man "would make as big a sensation as Darwin's Origin of Species."

Those are only the obvious lines of enquiry, but there are more suspects and motives strewn about the place. It makes for a nice, if somewhat typical, 1920s-style country house/village mystery.

However, John Norris from Pretty Sinister Books remarked in his review of the book that it took a considerable amount of pages to move away from routine police work and "enter the realm of originality," which is a valid complaint.

Bobby Owen and Colonel Lawson, chief constable of the country, do have a spot of routine work to take care of, before Owen can get to the meat of the plot: which consists of a pair of clever ciphers, posted in the agony column, and a genuine original, if somewhat bizarre, alibi-trick. But how much this preliminary groundwork and series of interviews is a reduction in quality really depends on how much you care about relatable or likeable characters, because there aren't many of them in this story and can bog down some readers in its first half – which wasn't a problem for me.

What I did found disappointing about the first half is that the feud between Dene and Andrews wasn't used to greater effect, which would've benefited the overall story if such vignettes had been interspersed with the interview.

The parts that did touch upon this feud were interesting and even had a bit of a Chestertonian flavor, because "the age-old conflict of the priest and the scientist," who are "both right and both wrong," has a paradoxal quality about it when their relationship was described as follow: "the one mistrusting too much reason, and daring to doubt where truth may lead," while the other mistrusted "too much faith, and daring to doubt where love might go" – concluding that both are "so tremendously right" and at the same time "so presumptuously wrong."

I wish there had been more of that, as well as more on the archaeological excavations, but Death Comes to Cambers is a very well written and (eventually) cleverly plotted mystery novel, which demonstrates why Punshon was so highly regarded during his lifetime.

If you want to take a crack at this book yourself, there's a new edition from Dean Street Press with an introduction penned by our very own Curt Evans.

Across and Down

"Well, it's all clues, isn't it? On a whole, crosswords are far more exotic and exiting than police work."

 - Morse (Inspector Morse: The Settling of the Sun, 1988)

During his lifetime, E.R. Punshon garnered favorable reviews as a fully-rounded mystery writer from the likes of Dorothy L. Sayers and the pseudonymous "Torquemada," but decades of shameful neglect preceded his slow rediscovery during the 2000s and now his work is finally brought back into circulation – courtesy of Dean Street Press.

I first took notice of Punshon when I read Nick Fuller's now defunct website, which described his "ability to construct labyrinthine plots" as being "rivaled only by John Dickson Carr."

Well, that comparison made me perk up like a prisoner receiving a jolt from the electric chair and I could see why the comparison was made when I finally read Information Received (1933). It was an excellent mystery novel reminiscent of Carr's darker, standalone work such as Poison in Jest (1932) and The Emperor's Snuff-Box (1942), but it was the only one I could get my hands on at the time. So I'm glad Punshon's is made accessible again to today's horde of mystery readers.

Crossword Mystery (1934) is one of the titles reissued this past summer and has an introduction written by our crime-fiction historian Curt Evans, which described it as "a novel with an intricate, fairly-clued puzzle, incisive social observation" capped with "an astonishing climax that surely is unique within the literature of crime fiction" – alongside some glowing quotes from Dorothy Sayers and Charles Williams. The latter saw in the book hope for the detective story's future and placed it alongside Ronald A. Knox's Still Dead (1934) and Sayers' The Nine Tailors (1934). You could argue that Evans' preface is more of an appetizer than an introduction.

The book opens with Punshon's series-character, Detective-Constable Bobby Owen, being send to Suffby Cove, which is a quiet, seaside village that had remained largely untouched by the 20th century. Owen's task is to pose as a houseguest in the home of a retired stockbroker, Mr. George Winterton, who's convinced that his brother's drowning was murder and requested protection – because he fears he may be next.

There are, of course, multiple suspects milling around the place, which includes three of Winterton's nephews: a horse-racing fanatic, named Colin Ross, a painter and black sheep of the family by the name of James Matthews and Miles Winterton – who was reprimanded by his uncle for flirting with his secretary.

Miss Raby is Winterton's secretary/typist and types out the pages for his book, Justification of the Gold Standard, while in her spare time she constructs crossword puzzles for the Daily Announcer. The list of suspects are rounded out by the servants, Mr. and Mrs. Cooper, and a businessman from London who wanted to turn Snuffby Cove into a seaside resort, which George's brother managed to prevent before his drowning.

All of the ingredients for a proper, thoroughly English country house/village mystery are present, but Owen wonders, early on the case, who "would want to murder two quiet, inoffensive, retired business men" spending their old-age at the coast – writing books, solving crossword puzzles and swimming in the cove. The answer is that there's obviously someone when an unmistakable case of murder occurs and it's (briefly) presented as a locked room mystery!

Owen has instructed Winterton to lock his bedroom door and fasten his windows, which are still in place the following morning and even the key is sticking in the lock from the inside.

E.R. Punshon

However, the body of the locked room's occupant has been mysteriously transported to the lawn outside, but the mystification about this aspect is cleared up within one chapter and the explanation is pulled from an old bag of tricks – very similar to the impossible elements from Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot's Christmas (1938) and Nicholas Blake's The Case of the Abominable Snowman (1941). So I have to tag this as a locked room mystery, but with reservations.

After the second murder, the story slowly moves away from the traditional country house-and village mystery to a treasure hunt-type of thriller. A clumsily made crossword puzzle with a keyword, "Gold," made by Winterton's is key to this hunt and beautifully reproduced in this edition. Anywhow, I have seen this portion of the novel being compared to (there she's again) Sayers' "The Fascinating Problem of Uncle Meleager's Will," from Lord Peter Views the Body (1928), but I thought the plot was more indebted to Sherlock Holmes than Lord Peter.

There are light signals seen in the garden that might be connected to a recently released criminal (The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1902), but there's also a dog that doesn't bark when he's supposed to ("Silver Blaze") and the treasure hunt reminded me somewhat of one of my favorite Holmes story, "The Musgrave Ritual." However, the most intriguing aspect of Crossword Mystery is that it was published in the same year as Darwin L. Teilhet's The Talking Sparrow Murders (1934), which are among the earliest examples in fiction that took a critical look at the then new Nazi regime in Germany.

This aspect in Crossword Mystery is poured into a late chapter, but it's there and with its connection to the solution one could argue that it's a prelude of the deluge of WWII mystery/spy-thrillers that would flood the market less than a decade later – making Punshon somewhat of a visionary. I would have preferred if Punshon's would've stayed within the territory of the country house/village mystery, because that was the best part of this book, but, historically, the final stretch of the story isn't without merit either.

So I'll end this messy, over-referenced review on that note, because I can't seem to write anything short and to the point these days.