The Great Beyond

"You can't evade ghosts in any case, and it looks as if they're going to play a big part in this mystery. The air here is full of them."

- Anthony "Algernon" Vereker (Robin Forsythe's The Spirit Murder Mystery, 1936)

Back in June(-ish) of 2015, the Dean Street Press and Curt Evans embarked on the arduous task of salvaging the legacy of the criminally neglected E.R. Punshon, once a giant from the genre's Golden Era, who wrote thirty-five police novels about Bobby Owen – a once humble constable who climbed to the rank of Commander of Scotland Yard. Over the course of a year and a half, this collaboration brought the entire Bobby Owen-series back into print and these brand new editions were introduced by Evans, which also offered glimpses at the life and work of Punshon's colleagues.

On January 2, 2017, the Dean Street Press is going to complete their reissue program of the entire series and comprises of the last ten novels Punshon wrote during the last years of his life. A period that covers the years between 1949 and 1956. Interestingly, this last batch of Punshon's "contain lots of extra goodies," such as short stories and an entire script of a never before published BBC radio-play, but also a newly written and slightly depressing introduction.

Under the title "Detective Stories, the Detection Club and Death: The Final Years of E.R. Punshon," Evans describes how "time had wrought cruel changes" on the members of the London-based Detection Club after the long interval of the war years. John Dickson Carr noted how everyone looked decidedly "greyer and more worn," but, by that time, eight of the original club members had already passed away and the relentless march of time would continue to thin their ranks – eventually taking Punshon in the mid-1950s. But the introduction also contains such snippets of information about his scrap with Anthony Berkeley, one of the "crankiest and most cantankerous," or how Christopher Bush allowed him recuperating from an operation at his home.

However, the bits and pieces on the final days of some of our favorite mystery writers are overwhelmingly depressing. Such as Sayers' passing, who was found a week before Christmas, at the foot of her stairs, "surrounded by bereaved cats."

Only a few months before her death, Sayers received a copy from Punshon's widow of his last published detective novel, Six Were Present (1956), which Evans described as "charmingly introspective," since she always appreciated her husband's books – famously asking "what is distinction?" and then pointing to a stack Bobby Owen mysteries. One distinction that's undeniable is the amazing consistency in the quality of his plots and writing. Six Were Present was written by a man in his eighties and who was probably already on Death's doorstep, but there's hardly any wear and easily one of my favorite Owen novels so far.

You see, Six Were Present is Punshon's take on the Carr-Talbot School of (Impossible) Crime-Fiction. So, yes, the book sort of catered to my personal taste.

Six Were Present is the thirty-fifth and final entry in the Bobby Owen-series, which saw him rise to the rank of Commander, but in his last recorded case he acts in an unofficial capacity in what is, essentially, a family affair – as a message from his cousin brings him back to the place of his childhood.

Bobby has taken leave from Scotland Yard and took his wife, Olive, for a motoring tour of the English countryside, which brought him to a bewildering standstill at the remnant background decor of his childhood days. However, as bewildering as the changed landscape is the household he finds: his cousin, Myra, is married to Val Outers, a retired Colonial Officer from South Africa, who is a specialist in African folklore and the dubious owner of a genuine Witch-doctor's medicine bag – which is said to contain a moldering dead man's hand and a hand drawn map of an unclaimed uranium field. Sadly, Outer's fascination for "the Unknown Powers the Africans believe in" may have caused the death of his twin sons. Myra and their daughter, Rosamund, always suspected Val of having ordered the boys to spy on a secret initiation rite. And when they were found out by the Natives, they were sacrificed to "The Dark Ones."

So that kind of baggage might make family dinners around Christmastime a bit tense, but now a psychic medium, Teddy Peek, became a regular visitor to the household. And in the background, Rosamund as three admirers moving around: a guy known as BB, Ludo Manners and a hunchback, named Dewey James, who lives with his invalid, but nimble, mother.

I think this cast-of-characters, background props and premise show Punshon's imagination was unaffected by old-age, but the storytelling, however, was affected. There's about of fuzziness about the details and the best example of this is the haunting memory of the twins, which hang as a pair of silent ghosts over the plot, but their names are never mentioned. They're always referred to as "the boys." The strongest aspect of the plot is the impossible murder and the plot-threads that were woven around it were not as firmly grasped as in previous books. Some of them appear to be nothing more than window dressing and disappeared (unresolved) into the background (e.g. the African seen by the side of the road). However, the murder plot is a wonderful take on the impossible stabbing during a séance inside a locked (tower) room.

Bobby is informed by Mr. Nixon, who's not a crook, but the West Midshire Chief Constable, about the murder of Val Outers. During a sitting in the Tower Room of the estate, Val was violently stabbed and the weapon vanished from locked and watched room. The room was pitch-black and the door were both locked bolted, while the windows were heavily curtained. Everyone was sitting around a round table. And in these conditions someone struck a deadly knife-blow, which killed instantly. But how did the knife manage to vanish from the room? And how did the killer manage to strike such a precise and powerful blow?

E.R. Punshon

Well, I actually (brag, brag) managed to solve the impossible angle very quickly and this is another case, when you know how it was done, you know who has done, because the method fitted this character like a glove. After that, you can easly guess why it was done. Or roughly guess. However, the killer and motive were absolute grand, which fitted the method very well. One that hinges on the Chestertonian paradox of "when is a knife not a knife?" So, perhaps not a stone-cold classic locked room mystery, but overall, a very competent and spirited effort for the annals of the impossible crime story. For someone like me, that's not a bad way to bow out of this world as a mystery novelist. Yes, I'm biased in favor of authors who made a genuine effort at writing a good locked room. It makes you sort of family.

So, all in all, Six Were Present is a wonderfully lucid mystery novel, with flashes of originality, from a writer who was in his eighties and published his first novel in 1907. Some of Punshon's colleagues have bowed out on less gracious terms. Agatha Christie's muddled Postern of Fate (1974) stood in stark contrast to the work that garnering her the reputation as the Queen of Crime. Luckily, she had prepared Curtain (1975) and Sleeping Murder (1976) well ahead to cover up that abortion of a novel. Speaking of abortions, the reputation of Carr's sad swan-song, The Hungry Goblin (1972), has always prevented it from being reprinted and turned it into one of his rarest novels. Edmund Crispin's The Glimpses of the Moon (1977) was, at best, an unnecessary afterthought to an otherwise excellent series.

Well, you get the idea. Six Were Present ended the series on a high-note and that was not always the case for even the best of the Golden Agers. And as a fan of the series, locked rooms and Carrian plot-devices, I would even place the book among my personal favorites in the series. So perhaps not recommended as a starting point in the series, but one you must read once you have become a fan. It gives a nice sense of closure. Luckily, I still have about twenty of them left on the TBR-pile and at least one other is a locked room mystery! So, I guess my next stop in the series will be Everybody Always Tells (1950). 

Finally, the book also contains the script of a radio-play, "Death on the Up-Lift," which I'll safe for a separate review (read: filler-post).

Down the Garden Path

"Yes, yes, murder is never very pleasant, is it?"

- Midsomer Murders (Garden of Death, 2000)

Over the past fifteen years, a whole flock of once obscure and long-forgotten mystery writers found their way back into print, which introduced a score of names to my list of favorite crime-fiction authors – such as Clyde B. Clason, Stuart Palmer and Kelley Roos. A recent addition to that list is E.R. Punshon. 

Punshon has nearly fifty novels to his name and thirty-five of them are detective novels about his series character, Bobby Owen, who walked on the scene as a young police constable (Information Received, 1933) and retired as a Commander of Scotland Yard (Six Were Present, 1956). However, one should not assume Punshon was merely an early pioneer of our modern-day police procedural. Punshon had a fertile imagination and possessed the ornamental writing-style of the early twentieth century, which some condemned as wasted verbiage, but I love how he was able to bring a room to life by pointing out a candlelit duel had once been fought in it – c.f. Ten Star Clues (1941).

I can appreciate a well conceived sense of time and place as much as a clever and solidly constructed plot, which is another one of Punshon's talent as a mystery novelist. Punshon justly received praise for his labyrinthine-like plots and ability to manipulate multiple plot-threads, like a practiced puppeteer, without his yarns becoming a tangled mess. A veritable artisan of webwork plotting!

So this resulted in over thirty well written, atmospheric and often excellently plotted detective novels that helped "kindly Mr. Punshon," as Anthony Gilbert called him, secure a spot on my list of favorite mystery novelists. A lot of these talents are reflected in the subject of this blog-post.

The Dark Garden (1941) is the sixteenth entry in the Bobby Owen series and one of the earlier books from the Wychshire period, which began (unofficially) in Murder Abroad (1939) and comprises of nine novels in total – constituting his body of wartime crime-fiction. Officially, Owen simply has to double "the parts of head of the not very extensive Wychshire C.I.D." with "that of private secretary to the chief constable," but Colonel Glynne always seemed to be sidelined in these novels. In this case, the chief constable is "recovering from a severe attack of pleurisy." So this leaves Owen in charge of all the big investigations, which occur often enough in this countryside district that it makes you suspect Wychshire County borders Midsomer County. Anyhow...

The story begins with a visit to the office of Bobby Owen by a local farmer, Mr. Osman Ford, who is a grim, dour man with angry eyes and a dark expression. Ford has enthusiastic plans to expand his farm, called Roman Ends, but these plans require funds and there's a sum of five-thousand pounds available, but the money belongs to his wife – which is held in trust on her behalf by a solicitors firm. Mr. Nathaniel Anderson is one of the senior partners in the firm and refuses to discuss the matter with Ford, because the money belongs to his wife, which angered the short-tempered farmer and he's convinced the money has been embezzled. However, Owen advices him to consult a lawyer, but this only angered Ford even more.

Not long after this confrontation, Owen hears that Ford has been airing threats against the lawyer and this is potentially a problem, because there have been persisted rumors that Ford has killed before – a young rival to his wife affection was found dead in an icy canal. Officially, there was "not an atom of proof" for murder and the affair was dismissed as an unfortunate accident, but there was still "lots of talk and gossip."

So Owen decided to give an unofficial warning to the farmer and determined to visit Anderson for further information, but what he finds there resembles a psychiatrist’s waiting room rather than a solicitor's office. Everyone who works there seems to be either obsessed or suffer from some sort of neurosis.

Anderson lives separate from his estranged wife, but has a relationship with one of the office secretaries, Miss Anne Earle, who was a foundling and only recently she was contacted by a long-lost aunt, Mrs. Augusta Jordan. However, Miss Earle's background as an orphan left their marks on her character and these markings drive most of her actions. She also has a much younger admirer among the office employees: a fair-haired, long-legged youth named Billy Dwight. The young man probably saw his employer as an elderly seducer and probably was the person who seen fleeing from Miss Earle's cottage (after being shot at). Arthur Castles is an office clerk, but also the son and grandson of the founders of the office, which the family lost after financial problem and Anderson made sure the boy got an education and a position in the office – which resulted in conflicted feelings within him. On the one hand, Castles is grateful for the opportunities given to him by Anderson, but he always wondered what part he played in the downfall of his father. Finally, there's the second senior partner, George Blythe, who shuns woman and is very passionate about his charity work for Hopewell House, which provides a home for homeless boys who might otherwise have drifted into mischief.

So there you have a glimpse of the intricate web of character-relationships and potential motives, which Owen have to give serious consideration after Anderson goes missing and turns up again halfway through the book – floating in a canal with a bullet hole in his back!

At one point, Owen visits the sickbed of Colonel Glynne to give his report and remarks that whole case "seems to have its roots in the past," because his investigation is littered with references to past happenings: a baby left on a doorstep a quarter of a century ago and bankruptcy from the same period. A wife leaving her husband several years ago. A drowning of a young man who would have been middle-aged today, etc. But there are also several tangible clues: such as an expensive, fur-lined glove that was dumped in the canal and the sum of five-thousand pounds that turns up in several accounts.

All of this can be read as a slow, meticulous crescendo that builds towards a memorable chase scene in the titular garden, in which someone takes shots at Owen with a gun that has a silencer. So he only hears soft pops as bullets whiz past his head. Evidently, Punshon also knew how to write suspense and this becomes even more apparent with the final dénouement over a freshly dug grave. Arguably one of the greatest denouncements of a murderer in all of detective-fiction. A fantastic and atmospheric scene that's only marred by the murderer's identity, which was a bit obvious and anti-climactic, but very forgivable in this instance – since I found the story as whole very good, interesting and somewhat unusual.

It's another example that Golden Age mysteries were not primarily about restoring order. Sure, the case can be shelved as solved, but the final tally is as dark as it depressing. There really are no winners in this book.

So The Dark Garden is not as great as some of Punshon's best work, such as Death Comes to Cambers (1935), Diabolic Candelabra (1942) and There's a Reason for Everything (1945), but still an excellent showcase of his talents as a mystery novelist.

On a final, unrelated note: JJ published the short story collection, Ye Olde Book of Locked Room Conundrums (2016), I conceptualized in this blog-post and the book is a free-of-charge. My next blog-post will (most likely) be about this locked room collection.

So... why are you still here? Why aren't you downloading and reading all of those free locked room stories? Go! Shoo-shoo!

Whose Body?

"The one thing I do know about murderers is that they can never let well alone."

- Miss Marple (Agatha Christie's 4.50 from Paddington, 1957) 

The Conqueror Inn (1943) is the eighteenth entrée in E.R. Punshon's decades-long series about a rising policeman, Inspector Bobby Owen of the Wychshire County Police, which was praised by Anthony Boucher in The San Francisco Chronicle as "rewarding for its solid construction" and "the distinguished characterization" of an Irish patriot. It's definitely an interesting and noteworthy addition to the shelf of war-time mystery and crime novels from the 1940s.

At this point in his career, Bobby Owen is doubling his role as the chief of the Midwych County C.I.D. with the post of secretary to the chief constable, Colonel Glynne, who was growing "more and more used to leaving everything to the young man already recognized as his successor" – which should have bound him to a paper-strewn desk. The key word here is "should," because Owen is on an errand that should have been confided to a subordinate. This errand leads him to a remote watering hole in a lonely, desolate spot of his district.

Mr. Christopherson is the philosophical-minded, but taciturn, proprietor of the Conqueror Inn, which alleges "to be the oldest licensed house in England" and legend tells how William the Conqueror was served wine there. However, the building was torched to the ground, during a skirmish between Highlanders and Dragoons, after which a new structure was erected in 1750. So none of the subsequent owners possessed the paperwork necessary to substantiate their historic claim.

What brought Owen to this remote and desolate place was a strange phone call from the present landlord: Mr. Christopherson placed a phone call to the police, requesting an experienced officer, because he had found a wooden box crammed with "tightly packed bundles of one-pound notes" – a grand total of two thousand pounds. A nice chunk of money in those days, but that’s not all the landlord stumbles across. Not far from the road where he found the box is "a new dug grave." So they open the grave, but even Bobby is shocked by what he unearthed.

The makeshift grave contains the body of a man, "stripped of every shred of clothing," with a single bullet hole directly over the heart, but the horrifying aspect is that "the dead man's face had been battered out of all resemblance to human features." As a result, Bobby finds himself faced with an unusual kind of problem: having to figure out who had been killed?

There are a number of possibilities: one of them is the son of the landlord, Derek, who went missing on the battlefield of Dunkirk, presumably killed, but evidence surfaced suggesting he might have survived. If this is the case, it becomes obvious that his family has been hiding him from the authorities, which also gives rise to another possibility: might the confused, shell-shocked young man might have shot the faceless man? After all, Bobby found evidence of an attempted burglary at the inn. Another candidate for the role of corpse is a young Irishman, Larry Connor, who came over from the Emerald Isle to enlist, but was rejected by the R.A.F. and seems to have gone missing not long thereafter – which is disputed by his uncooperative uncle, Micky Burke.

Bobby finds that nearly everyone involved in the case is annoyingly unaccommodating: the landlord and his daughter, Rachel, talk about as much as a brick wall. Rachel even openly defies Bobby and this throws the prowling policeman in a sulky mood ("women never play fair"). Bobby also encounters a military man, Captain Peter Wintle, who sustained a black eye around the same time as the victim received a sound thrashing, which was two days before the murder, but the captain refuses to slip any information to the inspector. It's noted at the end of the book that this needlessly complicated the case. Finally, there are Mr. Merton Kram and his daughter, owners of a lorry company, who seem to have a marked interest in the outbuildings of the inn. But are they involved in the murder?

So the slightly frustrated police-inspector has to piece to truth together from allusions, half-stated truths, a forged letter, a buried service revolver and burning candle on a mantel piece – all of them, somehow, tied to the box full of one-pound notes, black marketeering and a possible plot from Irish revolutionaries. This makes for one of Punshon's typically complicated, but niftily executed, detective stories that run all over the place. But his plots always seem to manage to land on their feet.

So I was very pleased with the overall story, but the reader has to be warned about one aspect of the plot: the revelation of the murderer’s identity and motivation is anti-climatic, because it turns out to be a rather simple, sordid and even modern kind of crime. One that was complicated by the mutilation, burial and the other aforementioned plot-threads. Some of you might respond with: "What? That's all?" It makes The Conqueror Inn perhaps more of a crime novel than a proper mystery, but I really liked the story as a whole. As you've probably noticed by now, I have a huge soft spot for these war-time detective stories and there was enough here to forgive that weak spot.

Note for the curious: Dean Street Press has previously reissued two other very interesting and excellent World War II mysteries, which are respectively Harriet Rutland's Blue Murder (1942) and Ianthe Jerrold's There May Be Danger (1948). Both of them come highly recommended.

Vermeer's Ghost

"Suddenly, all around us, there sounded a drip, drip, drip, upon the floor of the great hall. I thrilled with a queer, realizing emotion, and a sense of a very real and present danger—imminent. The 'blood-drip' had commenced. And the grim question was now whether the Barriers could save us from whatever had come into the huge room."

- Thomas Carnacki (William Hope Hodgson's "The House Among the Laurels," from Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder, 1913)

There's a Reason for Everything (1945) is E.R. Punshon's twenty-first book from his voluminous series about policeman Bobby Owen, now Deputy Chief Constable of Wychshire, which has one of the authors patent carpets of densely knotted plot-threads, but the emerging patterns usually form a logical, well-defined image. This one is no exception in that regard!

Bobby Owen has risen through the ranks of the Wychshire police department and has now become the Deputy Chief Constable, but he felt "both a trifle unemployed and a trifle grand" in his new office. The daily grind of the police apparatus were now taken care of by the men below him, like his assistance Inspector Payne, which is "a loss he was inclined occasionally to regret." Opportunely, the new Deputy Chief Constable receives an unusual invitation that places him on the spot of a fresh crime-scene.

Dr. Clem Jones, of Wessex and Mercia University, secured permission to investigate "the rumors or renewed hauntings" at Nonpareil, the ancient seat of the Tallebois family, where blood once flowed like beer at an Irish pub – which packed the house to the rafters with ghosts. There were some pretty famous ghost stories associated with Nonpareil.

During the English Civil War, a Cavalier's family sought refuge from a troop of marauding Roundheads in its great cellars, but they were locked in and died of starvation. On the anniversary of this tragedy, their disembodied "groans and lamentations" can be heard coming from the basements. Another story involves twin brothers, rivals in love, who fought a duel to the death in one of the rooms, but the ghost they left behind is that of their grief-stricken mother – who was often seen hastily walking through the corridors in search of her sons. A third story is closely intertwined with the second one: a bloodstain is often seen in the room where the twins perished, usually after their mother is seen walking the hallways, which then gradually begins to fade away. According to the legend, the "appearance of the bloodstain is a sign of an approaching death."

Dr. Jones and one of his colleagues, Mr. Parkinson, reported to have found a fresh bloodstain in the room where, reputedly, the tragic duel took place. Naturally, bloodstains are of professional interest to Owen. So he decided to poke around the place, but what he found there had very little to do with ghost stories.

Nonpareil is a dark, abandoned and largely empty house. Only a row of statues in the picture gallery are a reminder of its glory days, but a stone bust, "of a Roman emperor apparently," was toppled over the balustrade of the inner hall – nearly crushing Owen, Payne and Parkinson. And that’s just for starters! The second problem concerns the ghostly bloodstain: Dr. Jones and Mr. Parkinson drew a chalk outline round the stain and sealed the room, which was done by placing "threads in position across the crack of the door" and "a small paper wad fixed between the doorpost and the door." So that if would fall if the door were opened. Parkinson claims these "most effective precautions" makes it impossible for anyone to have been there during absence, but the only traces they find on the bare, wooden floorboards is a chalk outline. The bloodstain has completely vanished!

I first assumed the bloodstain-angle was some kind of chemical trick, which made it fade from a sealed room, but the actual explanation, given one or two chapters later, hinges on a common gambit of the locked room mystery. However, this very explanation betrays a very shaky claim to the status of a locked room, but, considering the premise and explanation, I still decided to tag this blog-post as an impossible crime – which I also had to do with Punshon's Crossword Mystery (1934).

Finally, there's a third complication that'll provide a great deal of trouble for Bobby Owen: between the space of a statue of a prostrate stag and a posturing goddess are the strangled remains of the paranormal investigator, Dr. Clem Jones.

The introduction, written by genre-historian Curt Evans, notes how "haunted houses figured in Golden Age detective fiction with some frequency," which include such notable examples like John Dickson Carr's Hag's Nook (1933), Carter Dickson's The Plague Court Murders (1934), Gladys Mitchell's When Last I Died (1941) and John Rhode's Men Die at Cyprus Lodge (1943). It's a rich enough background to draw on for a good, old-fashioned detective story, but Punshon never seemed to be satisfied unless he was clutching a whole jumble of apparently confusing plot-threads.

This is what makes his books seem so complex. But, by the end, they usually reveal themselves to have a logical and comprehensible plot-structure, which is perhaps Punshon's greatest accomplishments as a mystery novelist: being able to manipulate a multitude of plot-strands without getting entangled in them. So let's have a quick look at the plot threads.

One of those plot-threads triggered Owen's interest in the bloodstain at Nonpareil. Owen had read in one of Inspector Payne's daily reports how Constable Reed and Major Hardman, who lived at The Tulips, had heard a gunshot coming from the direction of Wychwood forest – which is not unusual for the countryside. But it had been late in the evening and Major Hardman was worried about his young, troublesome nephew, Francis "Frank" Hardman. He had been discharged from the army as medically unfit, but had already caused trouble in the village, which did not sit very well with both his uncle and twin sister, Frances. Major Hardman had given his nephew a five-pound note and told him to get a decent job if he wanted another penny, but, since then, he seems to have vanished from the face of the earth. How does the gunshot and disappearance of Frank Hardman ties in with an attempted burglary at the village of Major Hardman?

A different plot-thread involves a young woman, Miss Betty Anson, who works in Wychwood and takes a footpath through the forest when going homeward, which means she might have heard the shot. She has hurt her foot and a footprint, corresponding with her size shoes, was found near a spend cartridge and something seems to be weighing on her mind. But the question is whether or not any of this is related to the murder at Nonpareil or tied to the unidentified corpse that was found in Midwych Canal with two bullet holes in his back.

However, the most important of all the plot-threads from this novel concerns "a first-class, long-lost Vermeer," which, as a Dutchman, I always find an interesting angle for a detective story (e.g. Herbert Resnicow's The Gold Frame, 1986). I should also point out that Evans' introduction makes a connection between this plot-thread and a famous, real-life forgery case from my country, which could have inspired Punshon. However, this book has very little to do with forgers.   

Apparently, the lost masterpiece is "a view of Rotterdam in sun and rain" and Vermeer described it in a letter as one of his best works, but parted with the panel when an English lord made a generous offer, forty guineas in gold, which he was unable to refuse – after which the painting vanished from the history books. But now there are several people hunting for the painting. A Mr. Marmaduke Clavering, "an Honourable," who entered the story as an art expert who assessed the value of those "deplorable specimens of sculpture" in the picture gallery of Nonpareil, but it becomes apparent that what he's really after is the lost Vermeer. And he has a rival: a junior partner of a Mayfair Square picture dealer, Mr. Tails, who's "not too particular in his business methods."

As you can probably deduce, There's a Reason for Everything is made up of an intricate, multifarious and complex web of plot-threads, but Punshon laces all of these plot-threads up tightly. There are also a fair amount of clues and hints dropped along the corridors and rooms of this maze-like plot, which should point out the truth to the observant reader. It also provided another demonstration of Punshon ability to navigate the reader through a labyrinthine plot. I also like how he handled the abundance of twins appearing in this story and how he sidestepped the clichéd fate that usually befalls long-lost paintings and manuscripts in detective stories.

So, all in all, I found There's a Reason for Everything to be a rewarding read and even slightly better than Punshon's much touted masterpiece, Diabolic Candelabra (1942), which really was more along the lines of a Mitchellian crime fantasy than that of a traditional whodunit. And I begin to believe that I'm becoming a fan of Punshon.

Well, I guess that's a good a place to end this drawn-out review and let's see what I'll fish up for my blog-post.

Devil's Delicacies

"The true witch-magic of a wood on a midsummer night when the trees are heavy with leaves, and every leaf, however still the forest, has a voice and a secret all its own..."

- Gladys Mitchell (The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop, 1929)

Diabolic Candelabra (1942) is numbered seventeen in E.R. Punshon's Inspector Bobby Owen series, now attached to the Wychshire County Police, where he doubled "the parts of head of the somewhat scanty Wychshire C.I.D. with that of secretary to the chief constable," but this enigmatically titled entry is generally considered to be one of Bobby Owen's best performances – navigating through a complex and labyrinthine plot of Mitchellian imagination.

One review even stated "that in the construction of mazes," Punshon's "only rival was John Dickson Carr." You can understand, as someone who admirers both Carr and Mitchell, that this particular title has been hovering around my wish list for many years.

So I was elated when the Dean Street Press announced they were resuming their series of reprints of Punshon’s work and our resident genre-historian, Curt Evans, wrote new introduction for each title, which usually provide a back story for the book in question – e.g. an account of the real-life murder case that inspired the plot of Murder Abroad (1939). The introduction for Diabolic Candelabra tells of no such real-world connection, which, considering the fairytale-like plot, seems very fitting. 

However, I should note that Evans mentioned that the book appeared on his 2010 list of 150 Favorite Golden Age British Detective Novels. Under his list of favorite Punshon novels, Evans says he has been "undeservingly out-of-print." Well, that has changed in recent years, hasn't it?

Diabolic Candelabra has a dense, intricate plot with as many different branches as the titular candelabra, but one that's as solid as a brass candlestick, which begins with a recipe for "the most scrumptious chocolates that ever were." Or to be more precise, the story begins with a quest for this furtive recipe.

Mrs. Weston gave Olive, the wife of Bobby Owen, a sample of these "miracle chocolates," but the gift came with a request for help: she wants to sell these heavenly treats at a church bazaar, however, she has no idea where to find the person who makes them – a Miss Mary Floyd. She sells the chocolates through a place called "Walters," a tea shop, but they've no idea where exactly she lives. So Bobby and Olive are going to chase "a chocolate to its lair."

The lair in question is in actuality a small, lonely cottage tucked away in the thick, overgrown and sprawling forest of Wychwood. Miss Floyd shares the modest dwelling with several of her relatives: a poor, invalid mother, a stepfather of ill-repute and a nine-year-old sister, "Loo," who prefers the live among the animals of the forest. She is a character very reminiscent of Mowgli from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894).

Bobby and Olive learn from Miss Floyd that the recipe for the special chocolates is a secret, but one that belongs to a local legend.

Peter the Hermit is an elderly herbalist who lives deep in the woods in a ramshackle, one-room hut and never took a dime for his remedies, if he liked you, but often chased people away with an axe – which, nonetheless, gave him some popularity. But not with everyone. The local physician, Dr. Maskell, labeled him as "a public danger" and thinks of him as "nothing more than a licensed murderer," because there's "half a dozen in their graves" who ought to be alive. Add to this the persistent rumor that the hermit was sitting on a stash of gold and it becomes to be expected Bobby finds an abandoned, ransacked hut with a bloodstain on the floor. Both the axe and the hermit were missing.

For most mystery writers, this would've been more than enough to write a story around, but Punshon kept tying plot-threads to the main storyline: the owner of the previously mentioned tea shop, Charles Clayfoot, has gone missing around the same time and place as the Peter the Hermit. A very fat, red-haired man has been asking around for the chocolate recipe and Bobby saw a young man washing his hands by a small stream, but this person picked up his briefcase and fled the moment he noticed he was being watched. 

Bobby is also told about an unsolved mystery: fifty years ago, two El Greco paintings vanished mysteriously from Barsley Abbey and there seems to be a renewed interest in the village to find them again. These missing paintings play an important part in the story, but there's another object that disappeared around the same time, The Diabolic Candelabra, which is attributed to Benvenuto Cellini and "each branch was carved in the likeness of a human face twisted into every variety of hate and malice" – both of them are linked to the family history of the local gentry. And they bring their own set of problems and complications to the case that is unfolding in front Bobby's eyes. 

This all makes for a very intricate, maze-like and memorable story, which, despite of its many intricacies and peculiarities, becomes very simple and easy to understand by the end of the book. I feel proud for having spotted the cleverly hidden murderer long before the final chapter, but was equally surprise when Punshon, very briefly, hid this person again during that wonderful, candlelit scene in that dark, atmospheric place – which made me think for a moment my solution was completely wrong. What I also liked about the book is how it reminded me of Gladys Mitchell's Come Away, Death (1937), which had similarly structured story: a ball of strange and unusual plot-thread that eventually lead to the discovery of a body in the final quarter of the book.

Well, I sincerely hope I've done the plot of Diabolic Candelabra some measure of justice with this review, because I found the plot a bit tricky to describe, but one that's as rich as pure chocolate and as intricate as a hand woven tapestry. Undoubtedly, one of his better and most original mystery novels.

My other reviews of Punshon's Bobby Owen mysteries: 

Crossword Mystery (1934)
Death Comes to Cambers (1935)
The Bath Mysteries (1936)
Comes a Stranger (1938)
Murder Abroad (1939)
Four Strange Women (1940) 
Ten Star Clues (1941)   

More Deadly Than the Male

"And yet the motives of women are so inscrutable... their most trivial action may mean volumes, or their most extraordinary conduct may depend upon a hairpin or a curling tongs."

- Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Adventure of the Second Stain," from The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1904)

Four Strange Women (1940) is the fourteenth mystery novel in E.R. Punshon's Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen series and was republished only last year by the Dean Street Press, which means there's brief, but informative, introduction by genre-historian and fellow crime connoisseur, Curt Evans – who can be found blogging over at The Passing Tramp. It's was his introduction that convinced me to toss this one on the top of the pile.

In his preface, Evans goes over the plot and overarching theme of the story, namely the female of the species, which, as the title of this blog-post gives away, is often more deadlier than the male. A theme that compelled Ellery Queen to compile one of their better-known anthologies of detective fiction, The Female of the Species (1943). But that's literary a different story.

Punshon's exploration of the theme is described as a portrayal of the "darker potentialities in romantic relationships between men and women" and is, justly, likened to a darker, grittier reimagination of The ABC Murders (1936) by Agatha Christie, but what ignited my interest a mention of everyone's favorite mystery writer. The introduction revealed Punshon as a huge admirer of John Dickson Carr and he used to shovel a ton of praise on his work when he reviewed books for the Manchester Guardian, which is illustrated by a handful of quotes about The Hollow Man (1935), The Burning Court (1937) and The Reader is Warned (1939) – noting that readers should detect a "resemblance to the memorable Grand Guignol" from "Carr's shuddery shockers" in Four Strange Women. Indisputably, the man had an impeccable and refined taste for the detective stories! Let's see if the comparison to Carr stands.

Four Strange Women follows closely on the events from the previous book, Murder Abroad (1939), in which an important society figure, Lady Markham, engaged the services of Owen to perform a semi-private investigation into the death of a family member in France. As a reward, she would use her influence to get him an appointment as an inspector and private-secretary to the elderly Colonel Glynne, Chief Constable of Wychshire, but the night before his departure he finds a problem on his doorstep – brought to him by the impish looking Lord Henry Darmoor and his fiancée, Gwen Barton.

It's from them that Bobby learns of the sudden, inexplicable deaths of two of their acquaintances: Viscount Byatt of Byatt was found dead in his car, somewhere in the middle of Dartmoor, he had "been dead for a week or two before he was found," which made it difficult to find an exact cause of death. Second man to pass away under peculiar circumstances was Andy White, a second-generation millionaire, who was found in a cottage, "miles from everywhere in Wales," and he had been dead for at least a month. Before they were found dead, they were "getting rid of pots of money," which pertains to the women they were seeing at the time, but some of the expensive jewelry they had been buying has vanished without a trace – which definitely makes the sudden deaths of both men suspicious as hell. Lord Darmoor and Barton fear a mutual friend of them, Billy Baird, is marked for a third victim.

Evidently, the plot of Four Strange Women echoes elements from a previous entry in this series, The Bath Mysteries (1936), in which men who were forgotten by society were found dead in bathtubs. Punshon was apparently not done with exploring potentialities of thus subject, but used rich, successful society men as the victims for this book. And he threw the bathtubs out. 

Anyway, Bobby soon realizes that this case will place him between a rock and a hard place, because all of the women who had links to the dead men are friends of one another, but the worst part is that one of them is the daughter of his new superior – previously mentioned Colonel Glynne. As if the situation was not complicated enough, the charred remains of Billy Baird are recovered from the burned out debris of his touring caravan in a secluded spot of Wychwood Forest.

After this setup, the book begins to echo the story of The Bath Mysteries again, which is, structural an early serial killer novel, but dressed as a police procedural and Four Strange Woman is not much different in that regard. Bobby occupies himself with talking to the people he encounters and poking between the wreckage of the destroyed lives he finds, which allows him to slowly build up a picture of the murderer. However, I would hardly call the slow, plodding advance to the truth a Carrian tale of shocks, shudders and horrors. There are a number of characters who claim that "the powers of hell have broken loose" or how there was "some horror they dared not contemplate," but the atmosphere was only stated as being terrifying and the only genuine piece of Grand Guignol revealed itself in the final chapters of the book – when Bobby tumbled down and explored a dark basement. What he found there uncovered a cleverly hidden plot-thread.

Plot-wise, that plot-thread also gave the book a new and interesting prospective, because it basically turned the entire story in one big prologue to that second plot-thread. Even more interesting, Punshon could have written a detective story that revolved and began with the discovery in the basement, which would have involved the same plot-strands and cast of characters, but would have made for a completely different story – using the serial killer-angle as a dish of clue-sprinkled red herrings in the background. I found that to be a curious, but interesting, aspect of the overall plot of the story.

In any case, Four Strange Women is notable as an early example of the serial killer novel, which would become a cornerstone of the contemporary, post-WWII crime novel. It's kind of astonishing that a man from Punshon's generation, who was born in the 1870s and saw the emergence of the era of electricity, wrote detective stories in the Golden Age of the genre which seemed very modern or predictive of the modern crime novels of today.

But then again, it has been remarked how Fergus Hume's The Mystery of Hansom Cab (1886) and the short stories from J.E. Preston-Muddock's Dick Donovan: The Glasgow Detective (collected in 2005) have a peculiar modern feel about them. So maybe the modern crime novel is inherently regressive. Sorry, but I could not resist that small jab, which should not be perceived as a backhanded slight at Punshon. I've become very fond of his mystery novels and while some of his experimental works, such as The Bath Mysteries and Four Strange Women, will not always fully satisfy the purist, I can heartily recommend some of his more traditionally crafted stories, e.g. Information Received (1933), Death Comes to Cambers (1935) and Ten Star Clues (1941).