Death Comes to Cambers

Police officer Bobby Owen is a weekend guest at Lady Cambers's majestic country pile, there to advise on security following recent burglary scares. But when the lady of the house disappears, her bed unslept-in, it's a case of murder not burglary – for Bobby discovers her ladyship, strangled, in a nearby field.

One of the finest of the early Bobby Owens novels,
Death Comes to Cambers
combines wit and excellent characterization in a satisfying and classic whodunit, featuring an eccentric creationist, a superior archaeologist and an inventive cipher.

Death Comes to Cambers
is the sixth of E.R. Punshon's acclaimed Bobby Owen mysteries, first published in 1935 and part of a series which eventually spanned thirty-five novels.

During the Golden Age of detective fiction, British crime writers set myriad murder mysteries in imagined stately mansions of the landed aristocracy and gentry, yet as far as I have been able to determine very few of these writers themselves sprang from this privileged milieu. One of the most notable exceptions was E.R. Punshon's Detection Club contemporary Sir Henry-Lancelot Aubrey Fletcher (1887-1969), a baronet who between 1926 and 1957 wrote, under the pseudonym “Henry Wade,” twenty crime novels, in many of which he portrays country house settings that are, contrary to the stereotype of books by Golden Age mystery authors, decidedly demystified, shorn of nostalgia's romantic trappings. Although E.R. Punshon's first full-dress essay at the aristocratic country house detective novel,
Death Comes to Cambers
(1935), is hardly told in so grimly realistic a vein as some of Henry Wade's mysteries, Cambers nevertheless boasts, in addition to its interesting characters and accomplished puzzle plot, a delightfully subversive take on English country house mysteries. In my view it is one of the finest tales of its kind produced during the Golden Age of detective fiction.

Unlike his series sleuth, Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen, Punshon's own immediate ancestral background was non-aristocratic, both his paternal and maternal relatives having been strongly associated with trade, yet on his mother's side of the family he possessed remoter titled connections. Ernest Robertson Punshon was born in 1872 in Dulwich, London, to Robert Punshon, a sugar broker and civil engineer, and Selina Webb Halket Punshon, the eldest daughter of David Halket, a Newcastle timber merchant and convict ship owner originally from Perth, Scotland. In 1855 Halket, who seems to have stuck his fingers in altogether too many financial pies, suffered bankruptcy; and two years before his death he was taken to court on behalf of his wife, Mary Webb Halket, and their children, it having been alleged that he had mishandled money with which he had been entrusted in his capacity as his father-in-law's executor—a sad comedown for a man descended from the Halketts, baronets of Pitfirrane Castle, Fife. E.R. Punshon derived the pseudonym “Robertson Halket,” under which in the 1930s he published another two mysteries, from his middle name and his mother's surname, suggesting he took a certain pride in his Halket line, despite its having in this case come down in the world.

At the time of his 1866 marriage to David Halket's eldest daughter, Robert Punshon, a sugar broker descended from a long line of Punshons of Gateshead, County Durham (presumably William Morley Punshon, a prominent Victorian-era Methodist minister, was a distant relation), had two unmarried schoolteacher sisters, Sarah and Elizabeth, the latter of whom had served as governess to the wealthy industrialist Colbeck family at Whorlton Hall, near Newcastle. He later styled himself a civil engineer and in the 1870s he patented a series of inventions, including a process for treating gun-cotton with a sugar solution in order to better regulate the rapidity of explosions in firearms—just the sort of technical know-how that might have helped inspire his future crime novelist son.

After their marriage Robert and Selina Punshon for six years resided in Newcastle, one of England's most important shipping and industrial centers, moving in 1872 to London, where Ernest, the second of their three sons, was born. The Punshons seem to have led, like the Halkets before them, an unstable economic existence, a state that would follow young Ernest into his adult life. In 1868, Robert Punshon, recalling his father-in-law, filed for bankruptcy and by the 1880s apparently lived apart from his family. By 1881 he lodged at a house in St. Pancras, London, while Selina and the children resided in Harrogate, Yorkshire, where she was employed as a teacher in a girls' school. (Selina's four younger sisters, known as the Misses Halket, ran their own girls' school, Melchet House, at Lytham, Lancashire.)

By 1888, Ernest was a railway clerk and lodging in London with his elder brother. Many years later, Punshon at the age of fifty recalled with mordant humor that he “went to work in the accounts office of a railroad at the age of sixteen [the year his mother died]. After a year or two my office superiors told me gently that they thought I was not without intelligence but that my intelligence and my work did not seem somehow to coincide. So I thanked them for the hint, gracefully accepted it, and departed to Canada…” There, on the “golden prairies” of Saskatchewan, Punshon launched a venture in wheat farming that sadly quickly succumbed to the ungentle pressures of market forces. (He would later use this experience in his early mainstream novel
Constance West
.) 

Again undaunted by failure, Punshon traveled to Canada's Northwest Territories--where, he claimed, he once evaded pursuit by a pack of ravening wolves--and later drifted downward across the border to the United States, where he followed such diverse avocations as cow-punching out West and lumbering in Michigan. Returning to England not long before the death of Queen Victoria aboard the cargo liner
S.S. Armenian
(he worked his passage as a cattleman), Punshon settled in Liverpool, where he resided with his elderly retired schoolteacher aunt, Sarah Punshon, and took employment as a life assurance agent, all the while trying finally to make fame and fortune in the literary world, writing novels and countless shorter fiction pieces for magazines. In 1905 he married Sarah Houghton, and the couple returned to England's literary hub, London, where they would reside until his death a half-century later.

Punshon's closest immediate family connection to the country house life of the landed gentry appears to have come from an aged aunt who once had been employed by the Colbeck family as the governess at Whorlton Hall (and the Colbeck fortune was built not on the land but on what lay under it—i.e., coal mines). Yet in
Death Comes to Cambers
Punshon not only set his novel in a classic country house milieu, he for the first time provided readers with additional detail on the aristocratic background of his own series sleuth, Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen. When the novel opens, Bobby actually is staying as a weekend guest at Cambers House, having been invited there by his grandmother, Lady Hirlpool, an old friend of Lady Cambers, whose strangled corpse is discovered out-of-doors in the opening pages of the novel. (Additionally, Lady Cambers' fabulous jewelry collection has been burgled.) Colonel Lawson, chief constable of the county, is shocked to learn that Bobby, a lowly sergeant in the Metropolitan Police, is a grandson of no less than a peeress of the realm (“One moment he permitted himself in which to regret those older and better days when a gentleman was a gentleman, and, if he had to provide for himself, at least never thought of adopting such a dull, plebeian method as work. All this Bolshevism, he reflected gloomily….”). However, the good colonel determines--most providentially as it turns out--to request of Scotland Yard that Bobby's services be retained for this case.

Potential suspects in the murder of Lady Cambers, a well-meaning but imperious individual, are numerous, including her absconded husband, Sir Albert; a neighbor, Mr. Bowman, whose sister is suspected of unseemly carryings-on with Sir Albert; Mr. Tyler, a wealthy American (is there any other kind in Golden Age British detective novels?) who was most desirous of obtaining Lady Camber's famous Cleopatra pearl; Farman, a butler who may be hiding something shady in his past; Eddy Dene, the village grocer's son turned amateur archaeologist and fierce evolutionist who is the latest protégé of Lady Cambers; Amy Emmers, Lady Cambers' enigmatic personal maid; Reverend Andrews, vicar of the parish, violently opposed to what he considers Darwinian heresy; Tim Sterling, Lady Cambers' impecunious nephew and heir; Ray Hardy, son of one of Lady Cambers' tenants; and a mysterious stranger from London, in the vicinity possibly on account of burglarious intentions.

In
Death Comes to Cambers
Punshon deftly balances an ingenious and fairly-clued puzzle plot with considerable character interest and amusing satire of English class conventions. Not only is Colonel Lawson nonplussed by Bobby's ambiguous social status, he is outraged when those he deems his clear inferiors, like Eddy Dene and Amy Emmers, step above their stations, as he sees them, as can be seen in this exchange between the colonel and Miss Emmers:

The times they were changing in the Troubled Thirties even, contrary to still-prevalent popular belief, in the Golden Age British detective novel—particularly in those written by E.R. Punshon.

Curtis Evans

At the foot of the stairs, Farman, the butler, and Amy Emmers, Lady Cambers's maid, met each other. Amy was carrying a tray with the cup of tea and the tiny square of dry toast it was her duty first thing each morning to take to her mistress. She was looking a little flurried and disturbed. She said: ‘Her room's empty. She's not there.'

Farman had no need to ask to whom the ‘she' referred. In the language of domestic service, the unrelated personal feminine pronoun means always and invariably the mistress of the house. Farman knew, therefore, at once Amy meant that Lady Cambers was not in her room. But the fact did not make much impression on him. As was not unusual with him in the early morning, he was in a bad temper. Besides, he disliked Amy, who, he considered, was tending to secure much too influential a position in the household – one, indeed, incompatible with the unquestioned authority that in his opinion should be wielded by the butler. That was always the worst of a house where there was no master, and ever since things had come to an open breach between Sir Albert and Lady Cambers, and Sir Albert had departed to London, the influence of Amy, as her ladyship's personal maid and chief channel of communication between her and the rest of the staff, had been steadily increasing. A ‘favourite', in fact, she was becoming, and Farman didn't like it, and liked it all the less that Amy was so plainly trying to be conciliatory and friendly to him and to the others. But both her own position, and also the keen interest in Eddy Dene, Amy's cousin and fiancé, and his archaeological researches Lady Cambers had been showing of late, gave Amy a certain intimacy and consequent authority with the mistress of the house that the rest of the staff, egged on perhaps by Farman, were a little inclined to resent. So there had been a good deal of satisfaction and nodding of heads when rumour spread of a violent scene of mutual recrimination supposed recently to have taken place between the mistress and the maid. And all that the butler said now in response to Amy was an ill-tempered: ‘Mind you don't let her tea go cold.'

The remark was hardly relevant, but it tended to put Amy in her place and to remind her of her duties, and, having made it, Farman was passing on his way – on his morning tour of supervision – when, in the same worried and bewildered tone, Amy added: ‘Her bed's not been slept in.'

Farman only caught the words imperfectly, and paid them no attention. He went on along the passage to the garden door that according to routine he unlocked and unbolted. It was a lovely morning after the heavy rainstorm of the evening before, and, even in his present mood of sleepiness and bad temper, Farman felt something of its peace and beauty and of the soft loveliness of the early sunshine. A recollection of Amy's last remark stirred uneasily in his mind, as though in contrast to the scene without. He went back along the passage. Amy was still standing at the foot of the stairs with the tray in her hands, evidently not quite knowing what to do next. He said to her: ‘What's that you said?'