The Bath Mysteries

Bobby Owen is on a mission of unusual delicacy, finding himself conducting an investigation which involves his own titled but impecunious family. This time the cards were stacked against Bobby. He knew full well the cause of his cousin's mysterious disappearance, but he could not understand the baffling circumstances surrounding Ronnie Owen's death. Ronnie was a drunkard, but even a drunkard has sufficient presence of mind to refrain from remaining in a tub of boiling water for thirty-six hours!

Was Ronnie's death caused accidentally, or was it a deliberate case of murder? Moreover, why had Ronnie taken out a heavy insurance policy shortly before his death?

The Bath Mysteries
is the seventh of E.R. Punshon's acclaimed Bobby Owen mysteries, first published in 1936 and part of a series which eventually spanned thirty-five novels.

On 23 March 1915, Scotland Yard formally charged George Joseph Smith with the murders of Bessie Williams, Alice Smith and Margaret Lloyd. After nine days' trial Smith was found guilty on 1 July and hanged six weeks later, on 13 August. Justice (and sometimes, it must be admitted, injustice) was swift in those days, but although Smith's legal ordeal was brief, his infamy is imperishable. Today, a full century after his trial, Smith remains one of England's most notorious killers, the man who executed the infamous “Brides in the Bath” murders. Each of Smith's victims was a woman he had bigamously wed, then drowned in a bathtub. The sensational case was referenced in works by Golden Age mystery writers, including the Crime Queens Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham; but in 1936, E.R. Punshon--who the same year published, in the Detection Club true crime anthology
The Anatomy of Murder
, an essay on the infamous French serial killer “Bluebeard” (Henri Desiré Landru)--devised an entire detective novel that pivoted on the plot device of a sinister succession of bathtub deaths. In this novel,
The Bath Mysteries
, Punshon mentions not only the Brides in the Bath Murders, but the Rouse burning-car killing and the Brighton trunk slayings, further evincing his interest in true crime. It is one of Punshon's most interesting works of detective fiction, despite the fact--or perhaps, indeed, because of it--that it is a challenging book for the period, difficult to pigeonhole, as we are wont to do, into a convenient genre mystery category. The plot of the novel is interesting, to be sure, but it is the quality of Punshon's empathy for his victimized characters that makes
The Bath Mysteries
exceptional for its time and still resonant today.

The first couple of chapters in
The Bath Mysteries
raise the reader's expectation that what she has in her hands is a witty manners mystery in the fashion of the detective novels of Sayers, Allingham and Ngaio Marsh, yet something rather different soon emerges. The tale opens with Punshon's series sleuth, Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen, visiting a London conclave of his aristocratic family held at the Lords of Hirlpool's decayed white elephant of an ancestral abode, in which none of them could afford to live since the 1850s. As Bobby surveys the mansion's grand hall, from which arises the majestic double stairway, Punshon writes amusingly, in a passage reflective of the waning of England's traditional landed aristocracy and the waxing of crass commercial enterprise, that with all its marble and gilt “it would have done credit to almost any tea shop or cinema in the land. Indeed, one well-known provincial department store had recently made a tempting offer for it, though, unfortunately, trust deeds prevented its sale.” Here in this magnificent ruin Bobby encounters his grandmother, the dowager Lady Hirlpool, whom loyal Punshon readers had already met in the previous Bobby Owen mystery,
Death Comes to Cambers
; his uncle, Lord Hirlpool; Christopher (“Chris”) Owen, Bobby's cousin and an antique dealer who is “the heir to the title and the family mortgages”; Cora Owen, wife of Bobby's other cousin, Ronald (“Ronnie”), vanished for the last three years after being named as a party in an especially scandalous divorce action; and Dick Norris, who though strictly speaking is not family, was a close friend of the missing Ronnie Owen.

The family has recently learned that a man giving his name as Ronald Oliver, whom there is reason to believe may have been Ronnie Owen under alias, was found dead in his bath, apparently “from the effects of boiling water coming from a lighted geyser during approximately thirty-six hours.” (The inquest concluded he was “the worse for drink” when he ran the bath.) Oliver's—or Owen's—life was insured for 20,000 pounds, which was duly collected by a woman claiming to be his wife. Sometime afterward the same woman pawned a signet ring—Ronnie Owen's signet ring, bearing the family crest of three dolphins. Lord Hirlpool and the family want Bobby to investigate the matter personally, and Lord Hirlpool complacently informs his nephew: “I had a chat with the Home Secretary yesterday. He rang up the Commissioner while I was there, and you're to be seconded, or whatever you call it in the police, to look into the thing and find out what really did happen to poor Ronnie.”

Bobby, who is acutely embarrassed within the police force by his aristocratic connections, desperately resents these elite behind-the-scenes machinations and prays fervently that the next general election will “hurl this Government and all connected with it into outer darkness.” Until that fine day arrives, however, he has yet another investigative job to do, in what proves a singularly bizarre case. It turns out that the gruesome demise of “Ronald Oliver” in his bath is only one of several such fatalities that have taken place over the last few years, all of them involving obscure men whose lives have been insured for 20,000 pounds. Have these men been ground up in a kind of remorselessly efficient “murder factory,” Bobby begins to wonder, some “carefully prepared, widely spread organization of death, working in a strange and fearful secrecy”? Bobby's investigation takes him into the pits of London, exploring life among the down-and-outs in a decade overtaken by what the prominent socialist intellectual and detective fiction writer G.D.H. Cole in 1932 aptly termed “world chaos” (see
The Intelligent Man's Guide to World Chaos
, published by Victor Gollancz, who also, not altogether incidentally, published the detective fiction of Cole's Detection Club colleague E.R. Punshon). 

The characters of greatest interest in
The Bath Mysteries
are not found among the genteel sleuth's aristocratic family members, as one might expect in a novel from this period by, say, Ngaio Marsh (see
Surfeit of Lampreys
, for example), but rather are drawn from the ranks of the downtrodden. For these people Punshon memorably conveys sympathy in the most striking passages of the novel, with words, no doubt partly inspired by his own past personal circumstances (see my introduction to
Death Comes to Cambers
), that are powerfully condemnatory of human exclusion and exploitation:

It is in this netherworld of vice and despair that we catch glimpses of such striking individuals as the elderly sneak thief Magotty Meg, a colorful personage of whom Punshon readers were soon to see more, and the coffee-stall keeper George Young, nicknamed “Cripples” on account of his missing left arm and right leg. The arm was lost in a Durham coal mine accident, we learn, the leg from the impact upon him and his stall of an inebriated young gentleman's space-hurtling sports car. “Lucky...it was a left arm and right leg,” reflects “Cripples” phlegmatically, “keeps you from being lopsided like.”

It is between two denizens of this dark place that we find what Milward Kennedy, another of Punshon's Detection Club colleagues, in his
Sunday Times
review of
The Bath Mysteries
called “a love-interest…as moving as any which I can recall in a detective story.” More about this element of
The Bath Mysteries
cannot in good conscience be divulged by me to the neophyte reader of the novel, so I will simply conclude by urging that you read it posthaste.

Curtis Evans 

Detective-Sergeant Bobby Owen, leaving the Park, crossed Carlton Lane. Through the dark shadows cast by a cliff-like block of flats opposite he passed on, round the mews, into stately Carlton Square itself, where on the north side, No. 1, the ancestral home of his race, sprawled its interminable and depressing length.

Bobby surveyed it with a sigh, thinking what a difference would be made in the family fortunes if only legal complication, jointures, mortgages, reversions, Lord knew what, permitted it to be pulled down, and a new block of spacious, super-luxury, one-room flats erected in its stead. But that could not be – at least, not without a special Act of Parliament whereof the expense would eat up all possible profit; and so Bobby sighed again, and then cast a glance of professional interest at the third window from the southeast corner on the top floor, that of the room where legend told that, a hundred and fifty years ago, a servant-maid had been murdered in mysterious circumstances never cleared up. Then, ascending the steps leading to the huge front doors, he knocked; and as from the very bowels of the earth a thin voice floated up to him.

“Beg pardon, sir,” it said, "I can't get them doors open; they haven't been used so long they've stuck someway, or else it's the lock. His lordship was proper vexed.”

Descending to the street-level again, and peering over iron railings, Bobby saw, far below, the ancient retainer of the house whose services had been rewarded – or punished – by the job of caretaker of this mansion, which none of the Lords of Hirlpool had been able to afford to inhabit for three-quarters of a century past.

“Do you mind coming this way, sir?” quavered again the voice from the depths. “His lordship had to, and proper vexed he was, too.”

“Righto,” said Bobby, and accordingly descended the long flight of steps that led down to the area door, where the old caretaker waited. “Bit of a climb,” he commented; “if uncle had to, I can believe he didn't like it. Do you have to climb those steps every time you want to go out?”

“Oh, no, sir,” answered the caretaker, “there's the back door, sir, opening on the mews, but it's nearly ten minutes' walk to get round there from here. This way, sir.”

Bobby followed the old man through a series of grim, dark, chill, dust-strewn chambers, compared with which the vaults of the Spanish Inquisition would surely have seemed cheery, homely abiding places. They came to a spot whence steep and narrow stone steps led both up and down, though whether to a gloom more intense above or below was hard to say. But it seemed to prove that even beneath these depths there stretched depths lower still.

“Good Lord,” Bobby said. “Are there cellars under these?”

"These aren't the cellars, sir,” answered the other rebukingly. “This is the basement floor. Over there's what used to be the kitchen, and that's the door of the old servants' hall. Very spacious apartment, sir, and very different everything looked when there was a staff of twenty or more busy here.”

“It's a wonder they didn't die of T.B. or rheumatism,” observed Bobby, peering into the dark cavern that once had been a kitchen. “Probably they did, though. What about the breakfast bacon? How long does it take to get from kitchen to dining-room?”

The caretaker considered the point carefully.

“I don't think it would take more than ten minutes,” he decided; “not much more, anyhow. His lordship will be waiting, sir,” he added; “her ladyship, too.”

“Oh, has granny got here already?” Bobby said. “All right, I'll cut along. What about Mrs. Ronnie? Has she turned up?”

“Yes, sir, she came the first. They're all there except Mr. Chris. Mr. Norris came immediate after Mrs. Ronnie. It's the small room to the right at the top of the big stair.”

“Right, I'll find my way; don't you bother,” Bobby said, and began to ascend the steps leading to the upper regions of the house.

As he went he wondered again what could be the meaning of this family conference to which his uncle, Lord Hirlpool, had summoned him; his grandmother, the dowager Lady Hirlpool; his cousin by marriage, Cora, who was Mrs. Ronald Owen; his other cousin, Chris Owen, the heir to the title and the family mortgages, debts, tithes, income-tax, and all the rest of the financial encumbrances that went with their old and historic name; and finally Dick Norris. He wondered, too, why Dick Norris had been included, since Norris was not one of the family, though he had been a very intimate friend of the vanished Ronnie Owen. It was a friendship that had been formed and consolidated on the links, for Norris was a famous amateur golfer, known to a wide circle through the articles he contributed to the golfing press under various pseudonyms, as “B. Unkert,”, “N.B. Luck,” and others, all in the breezy, healthy type of humour that made him so popular a writer.