Suspects—Nine

“Know him?” he asked.

Bobby was for a moment too surprised to answer. He had thought of every one else but not of the man whose dead face now was staring up at him.

“Yes. I know him,” he said.

Bobby Owen's fiancée and milliner to the wealthy, Olive Farrar, has a problem. It concerns two competitive society matrons and a missing hat. But it becomes a case of murder when the butler of one of the ladies is shot dead, his body stabbed after the fact. While investigating, Bobby encounters many suspicious characters who might have done it – eight in total. Lurking in the shadows is a ninth suspect – but who can it be?

Suspects–Nine
, originally published in 1939, is the twelfth novel in the Bobby Owen mystery series. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

“What is distinction? The few who achieve it step – plot or no plot – unquestioned into the first rank... in the works of Mr. E.R. Punshon we salute it every time.” 
Dorothy L. Sayers

So-called “manners mystery”—the conscious use of the detective fiction form to explore social mores in the fashion of the nineteenth-century novel of manners—was enjoying great prestige in 1939, the year E.R. Punshon published
Suspects—Nine
, his twelfth Bobby Owen detective novel. By this time the influential English crime writer Dorothy L. Sayers had identified and powerfully boosted the manners movement both in her Thirties mystery criticism and her own detective novels, particularly
Gaudy Night
(1935), which was so concerned with the romantic relationship between Sayers's detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, and his beloved, popular mystery writer Harriet Vane, and the question of women's place in society that some puzzle purists of the day complained actual detection became incidental to the novel. Sayers's sister Crime Queens Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham followed Sayers's example in their own mystery writing. Marsh in the 1938 detective novels
Artists in Crime
and
Death in a White Tie
introduced a love interest, artist Agatha Troy, for her posh detective, Roderick Alleyn, to pursue and win, over a much wider social canvas than the author had heretofore painted, while Allingham in
Dancers in Mourning
(1937) and
The Fashion in Shrouds
(1938) intensively explored the social worlds of, respectively, musical theater and the fashion industry. These novels were, on the whole, rapturously received by crime fiction critics, and other mystery writers rushed to flatter with imitation these ascendant monarchs of manners mystery.

Not all of these crime fiction courtiers, if you will, were women. One of the most significant male contributors to manners mystery fiction at this time was E.R. Punshon, who, in his position as the crime fiction reviewer for the
Manchester Guardian
, had lavished praise on Sayers's
Gaudy Night
, which he gave pride of place in his inaugural
Guardian
review column. (Punshon reviewed crime fiction in the pages of the
Guardian
between 13 November 1935 and 27 May 1942, a span of over six years.) Turnabout, to be sure, was fair play--Sayers as crime fiction reviewer for the
Sunday Times
between 1933 and 1935 had awarded plenteous plaudits to Punshon's Bobby Owen detective novels—but the admiration that Punshon expressed both for
Gaudy Night
and its author's lofty goals in writing it went beyond mere reciprocal backscratching, for Sayers's personal ambition to write detective novels that were not only clever puzzles but good novels as well mirrored Punshon's own. “This is not only a detective story, not only a psychological study of a learned community under the strain of sensational events, it is also a love tale,” observed Punshon admiringly of
Gaudy Night
. “And since it is laid in academic surroundings one may borrow from the schools and award Miss Sayers a double first: honours in in the detective-tale class, honours in the orthodox-novel class as well.”

In Punshon's tenth Bobby Owen detective novel,
Dictator's Way
(1938), the author with Olive Farrar, the charming owner of “Olive, Hats,” a chic West End shop, introduced, as Dorothy L. Sayers had done earlier in the Thirties with Harriet Vane, a professionally accomplished and independent love interest for his sleuth. In the next mystery in the Bobby Owen series,
Comes a Stranger
(1938), Bobby and Olive are engaged to be married. Olive plays a fairly large role in this appealing novel, yet its setting is not in London, but rather at a village and nearby country house; and its focus falls less on Olive's romance with Bobby than an interesting criminal problem concerning a renowned privately owned library of rare books.
Suspects—Nine
(1939), on the other hand, returns Punshon readers to London society and a more intensive focus on intimate relationships between men and women, including Bobby and Olive themselves. Like contemporary mysteries by Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh,
Suspects—Nine
was extremely well-received by reviewers, this praise from William Blunt in his notice in the
Manchester Observer
being representative of the acclaim afforded the novel: “Mr. Punshon has never done better….Here is the true rigour of the game.”

Comically Bobby's involvement in the case in
Suspects—Nine
arises from a seemingly minor matter concerning a misappropriated hat. That intrepid and angular world traveler, Lady Alice Belchamber, author of the bestseller
Through the Earth's Dark Places
and notorious for having battled natives while armed only with a knife, triumphantly carries off from “Olive, Hats” a glorious treasure that was expressly fashioned by Olive's deputy, Mademoiselle Valclos--aka Victoria Alexandria Bates, or simply “Vicky” to Olive--for Lady Alice's greatest domestic enemy, famed beauty Flora Tamar, wife of Michael Tamar, head of Tamar Internal Combustion Engine Co., Ltd. (“[U]nlimited would have been a better description now that Mr. Tamar had patriotically placed all his resources at the disposal of the Government for their re-armament scheme at a mere trifling profit so inconsiderable that he never cared to disclose it, not even to the Government accountants themselves,” observes Punshon wryly.) Visiting Olive at the shop shortly after the great hat pillage has occurred, Bobby proposes that he call upon the two prominent society women in an attempt to ameliorate the crisis. To this proposal Olive assents, though with the admonition, concerning ravishing Flora Tamar, “don't fall in love with her….They say every man does at sight.”

Unable to retrieve from the formidable Lady Alice the hat Olive had intended for Flora Tamar, Bobby nevertheless assumes he has concluded his small part in the drama of these two implacable foes; yet he finds himself embroiled in a much more serious matter impacting both women when Munday, the Tamar butler, is found shot dead--and stabbed for good measure--on Weeton Hill, in South Essex. Bobby determines there are nine possible suspects in the case: Flora Tamar and her husband, Michael; Roger Renfield, Michael Tamar's nephew and heir; Holland Kent and Julius “Judy” Patterson, suspected lovers of Flora Tamar (the latter is a known denizen of the Cut and Come Again, a notorious London club which recurrently appears in Punshon's Bobby Owen series); Lady Alice Belchamber and her lovely niece, Ernestine “Ernie” Maddox; a sleazy private detective named Martin; and, finally, “X,” some person unknown.

During the course of Bobby's investigation of this intricate crime, Punshon finds occasion to wryly comment upon the mysteries of both hat couture and the romantic relationships between men and women. His writing is at its most amusing when Olive and Vicky explain to Bobby the intricacies of the fashionable hat trade, where the greatest difficulty is getting wealthy clients actually to pay for their purchases, but other droll challenges tend to rear their heads as well. “I thought it was the cocktails at first,” Olive explains concerning an occasion when Ernie Maddox behaved oddly in her shop:

The mess men and women potentially can make of their intimate relationships is much on view in
Suspects—Nine
as well. “You're young. Take my advice,” lectures a jaded Michael Tamar, between drinks, to Bobby. “Never love a woman. Mind that. Never love a woman. It's hell.” “Or heaven?” hopefully counters Bobby, who at novel's end remains engaged to Olive, whose wisdom concerning both the hat business and human relationships has been amply demonstrated.

Curtis Evans

Behind the shop—if one may use so commonplace a word for an establishment rare and strange even among those devoted in the West End of London to the sale of hats, there sat Miss Olive Farrar, sole proprietor, and at the moment very much wishing she wasn't, as she wrestled with the last quarter's accounts.

Once more, for the tenth time, she added up the figures, and once more, when she saw the total, sighed in utter despair. Not, as should traditionally have been the case, because the result was always different, but because that result was always the same, invariably, inexorably, ineluctably the same. Not by one iota could she get it different; and it showed quite plainly and simply that the total net profit for the last quarter amounted to exactly three shillings and sixpence halfpenny.

No wonder, Olive thought gloomily, that her fiancé, Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen, of the Criminal Investigation Department, Metropolitan Police, wanted her to give up the business, sell out, and get ready to marry him at once, promotion or no promotion.

Olive smiled faintly as she thought of Bobby, but reflected that there was seven hundred and fifty pounds, her little all, in the business, and that at present it would be difficult to sell it for as many shillings. Then she took up her pen and wrote in more clearly the odd ha'penny of her last quarter's profit. After all, a ha'penny is still a ha'penny, even if it is nothing more.

She tried to console herself by thinking of alleviating circumstances. There were, for example, outstanding accounts amounting in all to a substantial figure. In her present depressed mood Olive was inclined to wonder if a pile of bad debts would not be a more accurate description. One never knew, though. Olive still remembered the shock they all sustained when, after three ‘R.D.' cheques in succession, Miss Lucille Dubane scored a win at a night club—the win being the son of a wealthy north-country manufacturer—and promptly paid up in full. Not only that but still, after the divorce, she remained a valued client, almost always paying cash since the alimony had been arranged on liberal terms.

But a business cannot live on one cash client alone. Things might improve, no doubt, for certainly last quarter had been specially bad and no one quite knew why, though Mademoiselle Valclos, Olive's head assistant, advanced the theory that the falling off was due to competition from gas masks, which seemed, she said thoughtfully, to be to-day your only wear. In the whole three past months there had been only two bright spots. Lady Alice Belchamber had paid her account, outstanding one hardly knew how long. At this moment, too, Lady Alice was in the shop, selecting a new hat for the forthcoming Royal garden party at Buckingham Palace, and that incidentally was one reason why Olive was here, busy with accounts, and not there, helping to effect a sale. For Lady Alice, formidable and well-known explorer and traveller, pioneer of Empire, authoress of several well-known books of travel, was a little apt to carry into her everyday transactions those methods by which she had bullied and browbeaten her way through the most remote districts of the darkest continents. The story went that she once had cowed with her riding whip a tribe of armed and furious reputed cannibals, and it was certain that in her flat hung a formidable knife with which she admitted having slain the Arab, who, armed with it, had penetrated her tent somewhere in the wilds of the near East. Olive had been only too glad to leave Lady Alice in the calm, competent, exquisitely manicured hands of Mlle Valclos, so confident of her ability to deal with any pioneer any Empire ever knew.

All the same Olive was not altogether sure that Mlle Valclos fully realized what it was she was taking on.

The one other bright spot in this last quarter had been the appearance in the shop of Flora Tamar, wife of Michael Tamar, of the Tamar Internal Combustion Engine Co., Ltd., though unlimited would have been a better description now that Mr. Tamar had patriotically placed all his resources at the disposal of the Government for their re-armament scheme at a mere trifling profit so inconsiderable he had never cared to disclose it, not even to the Government accountants themselves. A modest and becoming reticence. It was not, however, merely the wealth behind Flora Tamar that made her so desirable a client. She enjoyed the deserved reputation of being one of the most beautiful women in London, so that to provide her with hats was not only a privilege, it was more, it was an advertisement. A hat on Flora's head, indeed, was not merely a hat, it was Publicity, and of course publicity is how to-day prosperity is spelt. Nor was that all. Flora had ideas, had what Mlle Valclos called ‘a touch with a hat', and on Mademoiselle's lips those words meant much, meant all. Olive herself, though admittedly competent, had never earned such praise, knew, indeed, she did not merit it, and would look on humbly and in silence while Mrs. Tamar and Mlle Valclos argued together, as in the shades Michael Angelo and Raphael may be thought to discuss other points of form and colour. Even at this moment there reposed in the shop a new creation waiting the approval of Flora and owing its central novelty—and what a novelty!—entirely to Flora herself. Hers alone had been the original suggestion; though in its final form it owed, undoubtedly, much to the executive ability of Mlle Valclos. The result was one that Mademoiselle was gently sure would create a sensation, would send the name and fame of Olive's establishment rampaging through every smart drawing-room in London, would set New York agog, shake even the settled supremacy of Paris. Already Mademoiselle had allowed a few of the more favoured clients—those who were influential or who generally paid up—to peep at the completed masterpiece awaiting Flora's final approval.