Comes a Stranger (37 page)

“Why do you think she went into the library after she had tried to shoot you?” Olive asked.

“I've been wondering whether she did try,” Bobby said slowly. “I have an idea she wanted chiefly to keep us off so that she could get the library door open and slip inside. I don't know what was in her mind. She may have had some thought of escaping by the windows. She may have meant to round off what she had done by trying to shoot Miss Kayne. She may have intended to shoot herself. Probably it was just an instinct to gain time. As it turned out one of the books Miss Kayne was throwing down must have struck her on the head and stunned her, and the fire did the rest. Death was actually due to suffocation—suffocation and shock.”

Olive said slowly:

“I can't help feeling sorry for her. I can imagine how she brooded on the wrong done her father, her mother, herself, till it seemed intolerable the man responsible for it all should escape punishment. It's almost as if there were something in her that might perhaps have been great—great in other ways, not only a great criminal.”

THE END

E.R. Punshon's detective novel
Comes a Stranger
carries an epigraph from the seventeenth-century poet Francis Quarles: “Death has no advantage, but when it comes a stranger.” A 1657 edition of
Enchiridion
, the original source of this epigraph, currently is available from a Swedish rare book dealer for over 2100 US dollars. How appropriate this is readers of
Comes a Stranger
will surely comprehend, since in the novel Punshon's sleuth, Detective Sergeant Bobby Owen, finds that the ambiguous origins of certain rare books in the fictional Kayne library figure centrally in the maze of mystery he enters. The Kayne library's highly-respected librarian, revealed in the course of the novel as a charlatan forger and fraudster (not to mention a murderer), is based, as far as forgery and fraud are concerned, on a real individual, Thomas James Wise, an eminent and influential English bibliographer and book collector whose astonishing literary misdeeds were exposed a few years before his death in May 1937. With Wise's passing, England's restrictive libel laws became far less of a pressing concern to Punshon and his publisher, Victor Gollancz, and
Comes a Stranger
duly appeared sixteen months later, though not without a protective note by the author, in which he assured readers that although “[t]his story was suggested by, and is indeed founded upon, certain recent occurrences, on which, however, for good reason, little emphasis was laid in the public press…[t]here is, there never has been, any library, public or private, in any way resembling the Kayne library. The owner, the trustees, the librarian, are all equally creatures of the imagination, and have no relation to any person, living or dead.” This statement is something less than the truth, at least as concerns the librarian of the Kayne library, a certain Mr. Broast, who in the course of the novel is revealed as the malefactor behind a shocking series of crimes, including, as in the case of Thomas J. Wise, literary forgery and fraud.

In real life, Thomas J. Wise entered the decade of the 1930s as one of Britain's most respected bibliographers, a former President of the Bibliographical Society, an honorary Masters of the Arts at Oxford University and an Honorary Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. A longtime avid collector of first editions, Wise owned an enviable private library of rare books, dubbed the Ashley Library, after the street where Wise had lived when he first started his collection. Wise funded the Ashley Library through the sale of duplicate copies and his services as a purchasing agent for wealthy book collectors in the UK and US. Ironically, given his later exposure as a forger, Wise had won for himself among bibliophiles in both countries an authoritative reputation as an exposer of forgeries. “Easy as it appears to be to fabricate reprints of rare books,” Wise once prophetically commented, “it is in actual practice absolutely impossible to do so in such a manner that detection cannot follow the event.” (For a recent convenient summary of the career of Thomas J. Wise and the investigation of the Wise forgeries, see David Thomas,
Beggars, Cheats and Forgers: A History of Frauds through the Ages
.)

Wise's edifice of probity, already viewed with skepticism by some discerning individuals, began its total collapse in 1934, upon the publication of
An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets
, an outstanding instance of literary detective work by John Carter and Graham Pollard, two of the twentieth century's most renowned bibliographers and booksellers. In their
Enquiry
Carter and Pollard definitively established that great numbers of rare privately printed, pre-first edition nineteenth-century pamphlets, depending solely on Wise's word for authentication, were fakes. For example, a pamphlet pre-first of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
Sonnets of the Portuguese
, dated 1847, was shown to have been printed not on paper made from rags, but rather on chemically-treated wood pulp, which did not become available until 1874. The spurious works authenticated by Wise included, in addition to the famous 1847 Browning
Sonnets
, alleged pre-firsts by such nineteenth-century literary luminaries as William Wordsworth; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Charles Dickens; William Makepeace Thackeray; Robert Browning; Algernon Charles Swinburne; George Eliot; and William Morris. Strict English libel laws restrained Carter and Pollard from accusing Wise outright of being behind the forgeries (in
Comes a Stranger
Punshon has an American character explain that the reason he refrained from publicly accusing Mr. Broast of fraud was fear of English libel laws), but their implication was sufficiently clear: “In the whole history of book collecting there has been no such wholesale and successful perpetration of fraud as that which we owe to this anonymous forger. It has been converted into an equally unparalleled blow to the bibliography and literary criticism of the Victorian period by the shocking negligence of Mr. Wise.”

With the publication of Carter and Pollard's
Enquiry
what had been mere whispers about Wise became the subject of polite yet pointed discourse in literary periodicals in both the UK and US. In a review of Carter and Pollard's
Enquiry
in the
New York Times Book Review
, Philip Brooks suggestively observed that the “activities described point to the work of one forger,” a person of uncanny skill and resource. A.J.A. Symons, himself a noted bibliophile and the author of the classic biography
The Quest for Corvo
(and also the elder brother of E.R. Punshon's future Detection Club colleague, the crime writer Julian Symons; see below) quickly joined the affray with a 1934 article supporting Carter and Pollard and demanding that Wise explain himself, which was published in
The Book Collector's Quarterly
; and later that year he privately printed (25 copies only, under the signature “A.J.A.S.”) a three stanza poem mocking the discredited bibliographer, entitled “Is It Wise?” Faced with exposure, Wise pled that illness prevented him from responding to the allegations, though his cause was ineffectually taken up by a few loyal supporters, including the prominent American bookseller Gabriel Wells, who published his own pamphlet in defense of Wise's integrity.

At his death three years later, Wise's reputation for integrity was in tatters, yet his Ashley Library, an undeniably fabulous repository of rare books, was purchased by the British Museum for nearly four million pounds in modern value. (With rich irony it later was discovered that Wise had stolen leaves from rare books in the British Museum to replace missing leaves in copies he owned.) In 1939, a year after Punshon published
Comes a Stranger
, bibliographer Wilfred Partington published the picaresque
Forging Ahead: The True Story of the Upward Progress of Thomas J. Wise
, which frankly acknowledged the fraudulent actions committed by his famous subject, revealing, according to a notice in the
New York Times Book Review
, a learned charlatan in all his fascinating complexity: “a paradoxical blend of ambition, effrontery, treachery and enthusiasm, a man perfectly adapted to shady operations, a pirate and a braggart, and yet underneath a substantial Englishman and a deliberate scholar if not a true one.” E.R. Punshon seems to me to have captured as well many of the facets of Wise's roguish character in his brash and boastful Mr. Broast.

In the 1940s, evidence continued to mount concerning the offenses of Mr. Wise. University of Texas librarian Fannie E. Ratchford published a book on the matter, in which she argued persuasively that the long-deceased bibliographer and antiquarian bookseller Harry Buxton Forman had collaborated with Wise in the production of the forgeries. (Like Mr. Broast in
Comes a Stranger
, who, we learn early in the novel, keeps a printing press in the cellar of the Kayne library, Forman was knowledgeable about printing and typography.) Additionally, Wilfred Partington, as well as Carter and Pollard, returned in print to the subject during the course of the decade. (Partington's book,
Thomas J. Wise in the Original Cloth: The Life and Record of the Forger of the Nineteenth-Century Pamphlets
, included an appendix authored by George Bernard Shaw.) Finally, there appeared two detective novels that were inspired, like
Comes a Stranger
, by the Wise affair: American Lee Thayer's
Murder Stalks the Circle
(1947) and Englishman Julian Symons's
Bland Beginning
(1949). When Julian Symons, the younger brother of A.J.A. Symons, was proposed for membership in the Detection Club, it was on the basis of
Bland Beginning
, his third detective novel, that he was accepted. E.R. Punshon wrote Dorothy L. Sayers that he disliked Symons's first detective novel,
The Immaterial Murder Case
, but that he considered
Bland Beginning
“certainly an intelligent and clever book.” (As seems often to have been the case, Sayers was of the same opinion as Punshon; see my discussion of Symons's acceptance into the Detection Club in my
CADS
pamphlet essay “Was Corinne's Murder Clued? The Detection Club and Fair Play, 1930-1953.”) In his surviving correspondence with Sayers Punshon did not mention that the novel, like his own
Comes a Stranger
, had heavily drawn upon the Wise forgeries scandal, but I assume that this fact was, as far as Punshon was concerned, a strong point in the book's favor.

Curtis Evans

E.R. Punshon was born in London in 1872.

At the age of fourteen he started life in an office. His employers soon informed him that he would never make a really satisfactory clerk, and he, agreeing, spent the next few years wandering about Canada and the United States, endeavouring without great success to earn a living in any occupation that offered. Returning home by way of working a passage on a cattle boat, he began to write. He contributed to many magazines and periodicals, wrote plays, and published nearly fifty novels, among which his detective stories proved the most popular and enduring.

He died in 1956.

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“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

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.