Crossword Mystery

What could be more innocent than a crossword puzzle? A game to while away an idle hour, a diversion for the lonely. And yet its cunning formula could still be turned to sinister purpose. The curious crossword devised by Mr. George Winterton turned out to be part of a game for high stakes – it was the creation of a man whose brother had just drowned and who feared for his own life. Yet the dog hadn't barked...

When Detective-Constable Owen (B.A. Oxon, pass degree only) arrives in the picturesque village of Suffby Cove, he is faced with the mystery of an appallingly ingenious murder – one whose ramifications reach out of England to the continent, and touch the lives of many men and women.

Crossword Mystery
is the third of E.R. Punshon's acclaimed Bobby Owen mysteries, first published in 1934 and part of a series which eventually spanned thirty-five novels.

In 1933 Britain's Detection Club, a social organization founded three years earlier by some of the most renowned detective novelists in the country, including Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Anthony Berkeley, G.K. Chesterton, Freeman Wills Crofts and R. Austin Freeman, inducted, for the first time, several new members. These initiates were Gladys Mitchell, Anthony Gilbert (Lucy Beatrice Malleson) and E.R. Punshon, all of whom pledged to honor in their detective fiction both the King's English and the principle of fair play in clue presentation. Punshon's induction into the Detection Club in 1933 surely would have come as no surprise to anyone who earlier that year had seen in the
Sunday Times
Dorothy L. Sayers' glowing commendation for him as a “writer first and foremost.”
Crossword Mystery
(1934), Punshon's third Bobby Owen detective novel, not only abides by the Detection Club's aesthetic precepts, it also validates the accolade that the admiring Sayers had bestowed upon him.

More than any detective novel Punshon had yet published
Crossword Mystery
beautifully balances puzzle appeal and character interest, the detection of crime and the probing of criminal personality, leading to a remarkable conclusion that readers are unlikely to forget. In the novel, which pleasingly includes both a “sketch map of Suffby Cove and village” and a crossword puzzle with clues and a solution, Punshon for the first time tasks his series sleuth, Constable Bobby Owen, B.A. (Oxon. pass degree only), with investigating nefarious goings-on at a country house, that holy of holies in British mystery fiction. “A little beyond the bridge, a turning from the main road led to Suffby village on the left, and beyond that to the low Georgian house Bobby had seen from the high ground beyond the creek,” writes Punshon, surely suffusing the typical devoted Golden Age mystery reader in a warm glow of pleasurable anticipation of murder in stately surroundings. Yet Punshon never forgets (and neither should his readers) that, even in cases of putatively cozy English country house crime, darkness may come.

At the behest of Major Markham, “formerly of the Indian cavalry, and now Chief Constable of Deneshire,” Bobby's mentor, Superintendent Mitchell, has deputed the young man to serve as a sort of bodyguard for wealthy George Winterton at his domicile Fairview, a Georgian house overlooking Suffby Cove. “He's a retired business man; former stockbroker, I believe; quite well off, interested in crosswords and economics,” chattily explains Major Markham as he offers Bobby a “cheroot of almost unimaginable strength.” Winterton insists that the recent drowning death of his twin brother, Archibald (like Winterton a stockbroker who had retired to Deneshire, residing at a house across the Cove at Suffby Point), was not an accident, but murder; and he declares that he too is in grave peril. Having a friend who is an MP, representing a London constituency, Winterton is able to obtain from Scotland Yard the promise of police protection, in the genial form of Constable Owen. Yet who, Bobby soon is asking himself, “would want to murder two quiet, inoffensive, retired business men, ending their days peacefully by the seaside?”

At Fairview Bobby encounters a classic rich man's mystery ménage. There are the Coopers, the couple who serve as Fairview's butler and housekeeper; Miss Raby, George Winterton's winsome lady secretary; Colin Ross, an impecunious nephew addicted to racing forms; and a pet Airedale that, in a nod to Arthur Conan Doyle's classic Sherlock Holmes tale “Silver Blaze,” failed to bark when expected. Although not residents of Fairview, a couple of other nephews are in the picture too, namely Miles Winterton, an out-of-work engineer, and James Matthews, an artist living in Paris who is, naturally enough, “the black sheep of the family.” Also of note is the aggressive land developer Mr. Shorter, whom Bobby, upon his arrival at Fairview, finds George Winterton angrily ejecting from his house.

Was Archibald Winterton murdered? Is the close-lipped George Winterton truly in danger and, if so, from just what source does the menace arise? Can Bobby, for the first time in his recorded cases relying to a considerable extent upon his own resources, prevent a second murder (assuming there was a first one)? Readers will surely want to find out for themselves.

Crossword Mystery
is a novel with an intricate, fairly-clued puzzle, incisive social observation (among English mystery novelists Punshon was as far as I know the earliest and most persistent decrier of the Nazi scourge in Europe) and an astonishing climax that surely is unique within the literature of crime fiction. So impressed with Crossword Mystery was the distinguished writer and Oxford University Press editor Charles Williams—like Dorothy L. Sayers an astute Thirties mystery fiction critic—that he declared he discerned in the novel hope for the revivification of detective fiction as an art form:

Williams particularly praised
Crossword Mystery
for “the vigour of the last chapter” and “the steady sweep of energy that moves it…” Later that year, his sentiment was echoed in the United States, where
Crossword Mystery
had been picked up by the prominent publisher Alfred A. Knopf, who issued it under a rather more direct title,
The Crossword Murder
. (The most celebrated Knopf mystery from 1934 was Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled crime novel
The Thin Man
, one of the most conspicuous Thirties publishing successes.) In the
Saturday Review
William C. Weber deemed the plot of
Crossword Mystery
“engrossing” and its denouement a “knockout,” while in the
New York Times Book Review
Isaac Anderson applauded the novel for “bafflement of a high order and a truly startling finish.” I concur with the high praise afforded
Crossword Mystery
on both sides of the Atlantic. Today, over eighty years after it was originally published, it is indeed a pleasure to see the novel back in print, for such glittering examples of Golden Age detective fiction will never truly tarnish.

Curtis Evans

 

It was one of the loveliest days of a lovely summer, and Detective-Constable Bobby Owen, B.A. (Oxon. pass degree only), as he jogged placidly along on a brand-new motor-cycle (Government property) at a quiet forty or fifty m.p.h., with an occasional burst up to seventy or eighty when he was quite sure there were no traffic police about, was almost able to persuade himself that after all there are on this earth, though rare, worse jobs than police jobs.

He was even not indifferent to the fact that he was wearing a new and expensive suit, cut by a first-class tailor and paid for by a generous country, whose head presumably had been a little turned by a recent announcement of a possible Budget surplus. Even the contents of the suit-case strapped on behind – dinner-jacket and so on, all very smart and new – had been provided for him in the same way; and, though he had no doubt his chief, Superintendent Mitchell, would jolly well make him work for them, at any rate he had no tailor's bill to fear – the happy, happy youth.

There appeared before him by the roadside Ye Olde Englyshe Petrol Pumpe Station for which he had been instructed to look out. He passed, and took the next turning north, a by-road that led to Deneham, the smart little east coast resort that had recently been winning favour by its stern refusal of hospitality to trippers – for whom, besides, its rather remote situation made it lack attractiveness, so there was no risk of hard feeling on either side. A mile or so along this road Bobby came to a small tea garden, a lonely, forlorn-looking little place, though bravely announcing itself as Ye Olde Sunke Tudor Tea Garden, presumably in a fine frenzy of rivalry with Ye Olde Englyshe Petrol Pumpe Station on the main road. Here Bobby alighted, parked his nice new motor-cycle in a convenient shed provided for the purpose, noted with a slight involuntary shudder that shrimps were fourpence a plate, sixpence shelled, and understood at once what strange subtle odour it was had mingled with the scent of the roses and the honeysuckle growing around. In the garden – why it was called “sunke” did not appear – were half a dozen tables with attendant chairs, all in rickety wicker. He seated himself at one, and ordered tea and toast and eggs to satisfy an appetite his long ride from London had provided with a fine edge. But the toast was a mistake, toast in “ye olde Tudor” days having evidently been chiefly used for roof repairs.

However, the eggs were new laid in the literal, not the commercial, sense – that is, they had come into being that same morning; and, if the tea were stewed, Bobby's young life, that had progressed from a well-known public school to an Oxford college and thence to London lodgings, had given him no knowledge or experience of tea that was not well and truly stewed.

So he drank it contentedly, enjoyed his new-laid eggs, and, if the toast baffled him who did not easily acknowledge defeat, he made a good exchange of it for plain bread and butter. This simple repast completed, he was about to light a cigarette when he heard a car approaching. Reflecting that Superintendent Mitchell smoked excellent cigars, and, since it was a fine day, since there was no specially trying case on at the moment, and, since above all, the Assistant Commissioner was away on a holiday, might well prove in a liberal and generous mood, Bobby hurriedly put his own gaspers away and hoped for the best. Then he rose respectfully to his feet as there entered the garden that redoubtable personage, his chief, Superintendent Mitchell, the biggest of the “big four,” as the papers called them, who were at the moment in charge of the destinies of the Scotland Yard C.I.D.

Following him was a tall, thin man with a narrow, lined face, hair that seemed prematurely grey – for he did not look much more than half-way between forty and fifty – and a complexion tanned a dull brick-brown by presumably a sun hotter than that this climate usually provides. Bobby guessed he would be Major Markham, formerly of the Indian cavalry, and now Chief Constable of Deneshire, in accordance with the happy rule that a thorough grounding in drill, especially cavalry drill, is the best possible preparation for police work. They came across to where Bobby was waiting, and Mitchell nodded pleasantly.

“Constable Owen,” he explained to his companion. “He was with me in the sun-bathing case, and he was with me, too – or I was with him, I never quite knew which – in the Christopher Clarke case – ‘
Hamlet
in Modern Dress,' as some of the newspaper wits called it.”