Ten Star Clues

“I'll have breakfast ready before you're dressed,” Olive said, her mind full of bacon and eggs, tea, toast.

“Can't stop,” Bobby told her. “I've to be at Castle Wych at once.”

“What's happened there?”

“Murder,” Bobby answered as he made for the door.

Bobby Owen has left London and is now a policeman in the bucolic county of Wychshire. The local community is stunned when a missing heir returns to Castle Wych, determined to claim his inheritance. But following the ensuing dispute over his identity, Castle Wych plays host to murder. There are ten “star clues” investigated by the resourceful Bobby, with help from his wife Olive, in this delightful and classic example of the golden age mystery novel.

Ten Star Clues
, originally published in 1941, is the fifteenth novel in the Bobby Owen mystery series. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.

“Mr E.R. Punshon is one of the most entertaining and readable of our sensational novelists because his characters really live and are not merely pegs from which a mystery depends.”
Punch

The tale of the alleged lost heir who has returned home to claim his patrimony in the face of strenuous denials of his identity has proven a perennially popular one in English crime fiction. Probably the most well-known example of the plot today is found in Josephine Tey's much-admired suspense novel
Brat Farrar
(1949), although with
The Traveller Returns
(1945) (in the US,
She Came Back
), the popular Golden Age crime writer Patricia Wentworth preceded Tey into print by four years with a feminine variation on the theme. However, E.R. Punshon anticipated both women on the subject with his fifteenth Bobby Owen detective novel,
Ten Star Clues
(1941), a classic British stately home mystery wherein Bobby, in his first investigation carried out entirely in the Midlands county of Wychshire in his capacity as detective-inspector and private secretary to Chief Constable Glynne, tries his best to solve the baffling problem of just which Wych is Wych. Confused? Read on!

Somewhat unusually for an E.R. Punshon detective novel,
Ten Star Clues
starts with an extended section devoted to detailing the rising tensions among the novel's cast of characters, with Inspector Owen not making his first appearance until a quarter of the story has elapsed, after murder has finally struck. In this opening section of the novel, Punshon introduces the individuals connected to Castle Wych, located near the village of Brimsbury Wych. (“One of England's show places and not without its niche in history,” Punshon observes of the castle, “open to the public on Saturdays and holidays on payment of one shilling, for the benefit of the funds of the Midwych General Hospital.”) These individuals are the elderly Earl and Countess Wych; Anne Hoyle, their masterful granddaughter, debarred by her sex, much to her irritation, from inheriting the Wych title and estates; Ralph Hoyle, their plainspoken great-nephew, estate manager and heir presumptive; Arthur Hoyle, another great-nephew, next in the line of succession after Ralph and a wealthy, smooth-talking company director who resides, Punshon wryly notes, “in some style in an imposing mansion known as The Thatched Cottage, presumably because it was neither thatched nor a cottage”; the absentminded Reverend Louis Longden, vicar of Brimsbury Wych, and his demure daughter, Sophy, companion to the ailing Countess Wych; Clinton Wells, “youngest partner in the old established firm of Wells, Clinton, Wells and Blacklock that for many years had been in charge of all the legal side of the Hoyle estates”; and Martin, the odious new butler at Castle Wych, “[p]lump, soft-footed, complacent—too complacent.”

Into this mix of vintage English mystery characters comes a highly disturbing element: a bumptious individual from the United States claiming to be Bertram Hoyle, grandson of Earl and Countess Wych. The family had presumed that Bertram met his demise a decade ago in the United States, yet Earl and Countess Wych quickly embrace the young man as Bertram, displacing Ralph Hoyle as heir presumptive to the Wych title and estates. Deeply disgruntled by this development, Ralph proclaims loudly to all and sundry that his “cousin” Bertram is a scoundrel and fake, and that he, Ralph, will prove him such. Not long afterward someone is shot dead in the library at Castle Wych, leaving Inspector Bobby Owen and Chief Constable Glynne tasked with unmasking a wily murderer. Late in the novel Bobby lists ten clues, dubbed by him “star” clues, which he believes are the keys to solving the crime—can you, in contrast with the flummoxed Colonel Glynne, beat Bobby to the solution?

At several points in
Ten Star Clues
characters reference the famous Victorian case of the Tichborne Claimant, in which an Australian butcher named Thomas Castro appeared in England in 1866 to claim that he was Roger Tichborne, the missing heir to the Tichborne baronetcy, who was widely believed to have expired in a shipwreck off the coast of Brazil a dozen years earlier. The case--of which it has been stated that “[n]o detective novel has a more complex and absorbing plot”--became one of the great causes célèbres in Victorian England, and has since stimulated the imaginations of English writers of both crime fiction and criminal history. In 1936, Frederic Herbert Maugham, elder brother of author Somerset Maugham and a prominent lawyer who had been recently ennobled as Baron Maugham, published
The Tichborne Case
, a classic account of the affair, while two years later the great locked room mystery writer John Dickson Carr drew on the Tichborne imbroglio for his acclaimed detective novel
The Crooked Hinge
(1938).

While not as singular a production as Carr's fantastically eerie and unnerving mystery, Punshon's
Ten Star Clues
is composed in the author's very best vein. Simultaneously intriguing and charming and peopled by a splendid gallery of keenly observed characters, the novel is a model of Golden Age English mystery. In his review of
Ten Star Clues
in the
Spectator
, Punshon's Detection Club colleague Nicholas Blake (the poet Cecil Day Lewis) allowed that
Ten Star Clues
has a “traditional atmosphere of Earls, libraries and sinister butlers,” but he nevertheless declared that the novel rose above convention “by soundness of characterization and the personality of Mr. Punshon's detective.” He also deemed Bobby's solutions to the dual puzzles concerning the identities of the claimant and the killer “not only exciting but plausible.”

Another interesting facet of
Ten Star Clues
is its setting in England during the so-called “Phoney War,” the early phase of relative inactivity in the Second World War that fell between the German-Soviet invasion of Poland in September 1939 and the German attack on the Low Countries that commenced in May 1940. Bobby's newly-wedded wife, Olive--formerly Olive Farrar, owner of the chic shop “Olive, Hats”— dutifully attends ARP (Air Raid Precautions) lectures, where she incidentally meets Sophie Longden. (“I liked Miss Owen,” Sophy girlishly gushes to Countess Wych. “She seemed very nice, only rather awfully stylish. Oh, and her hats….Each time she had a different one, and each time it was nothing really and yet perfectly wonderful. She used to have a hat shop before she married, someone said.”) After England's declaration of war on Germany, Bobby for his part handed in his resignation from the police force in order to enlist in the armed forces, but his resignation, we learn, was “instantly rejected.” County martial preparations ultimately play a key role in Bobby's solution of one of the novel's central mysteries.

War was much on E.R. Punshon's mind when he wrote
Ten Star Clues
, in a two-month period over September-October 1940. With his gently wry humor the author tellingly dedicated the novel to “THE SIREN”, “Whose irresistible song so often lured away the writer from his work.” He of course refers ironically to the air raid siren, which after the Germans commenced the Blitz sounded many times throughout those months on Nimrod Road, Streatham, where Punshon resided in London with Sarah Punshon, his wife of thirty-five years. Presciently the author had evacuated Bobby Owen and his wife Olive from London to comparative safety in Wychshire, a rural Midlands county of his splendidly fertile imagination, but both Punshon and his wife themselves steadfastly remained in London to face the horrors of German air bombardment. In my introduction to the next set of Dean Street Press reissues of Bobby Owen detective novels, I will discuss more about the matter of E.R. Punshon and the Second World War, while continuing the chronicle of Inspector Owen's battles with crime in Wychshire.

Curtis Evans

Tea was ready on the great south terrace of Castle Wych, one of England's show places and not without its niche in history, open to the public on Saturdays and holidays on payment of one shilling, for the benefit of the funds of the Midwych General Hospital. Plump, soft-footed, complacent—too complacent—Martin, the new butler, was putting the finishing touches to the tea things. Somehow, correctly conventional as he was in movement and appearance, he yet managed to give an impression of a secret, gloating satisfaction. Ralph Hoyle, leaning against the parapet, found himself reminded of a vulture, a filthy, obscene vulture, hovering over a dying man. Ralph knew this was absurd. It was his own imagination, he was well aware, a result of the tension of the moment. Nevertheless the impression remained. He glanced at his cousin and fiancée, Anne Hoyle, wondering if she felt the same. Apparently not, for she was absorbed in twisting his engagement ring round and round upon her finger. But then Anne seldom noticed servants, not, that is, so long as they carried out their duties satisfactorily. She said abruptly:—

“I can't think why grand-dad doesn't just send for the police.”

 “Well, I don't like the chap myself,” Ralph agreed, “but why the police? Sack him. I don't know why you ever let Uncle Ralph take him on. Of course, it's no end of a job, getting decent butlers these days.”

“Don't be a fool,” snapped Anne. “You know I didn't mean Martin.”

“No, I suppose not,” agreed Ralph. “I expect I was trying to be funny. I always do when I'm a bit nervy.”

“Nothing to be nervy about, is there?” Anne asked.

Ralph did not answer. She knew as well as he did how much or how little there was to be nervy about. It was the length of the interview in the study from which they had been excluded that was troubling them, that was giving to Martin his air of a secret and malicious satisfaction. They had both thought it would have ended long ago, and it still went on. Neither of them could imagine why. But it meant that both were becoming conscious of a vague and increasing unease.

Anne was still absorbed in apparent contemplation of the engagement ring on her finger. It was a nice ring. It had cost a hundred pounds. She knew the exact figure, because her grandfather, old Earl Wych, had told her as a great secret. But it hadn't been Ralph's hundred pounds. For one thing Ralph hadn't a hundred pounds, hardly a hundred pence for that matter. Her grandfather—who was also Ralph's great-uncle—had provided the money for this ring. That was a proof of how greatly the formal engagement had pleased him. Because he was not an old man who parted very easily with his money. Not a miser, of course, but his dislike of drawing cheques had always been marked, and had increased with age. All the same it was a nice ring. Turning it round and round upon her finger, Anne thought:—

“Suppose it's true. If it is... but it can't be... it can't.”

She looked up at Ralph. He was tall, well built, with the fair hair, blue eyes, dominant nose of the Hoyles, who for some hundreds of years had lived and flourished at Castle Wych and owned most—but less now than formerly—of the surrounding country. In accordance with the present fashion, he was clean shaven, so that one could see the big mouth with the thin, straight lips that were also a characteristic of the Hoyles. His big, square chin stuck out, too, in a way reminiscent rather of the earlier than of the later Hoyles, who had generally owed their continued success to a certain nimble suppleness of mind rather than to that thrusting energy of which such a chin is supposed to be a sign. It was certainly a sign very apparent in the effigy of the founder of the family, the first Baron Hoyle, who had undoubtedly been a bit in the traditional robber-baron line.

Since those far-off days, however, the Hoyles had generally preferred to be lawyers, politicians, high ecclesiastics— place holders, in brief—rather than soldiers or adventurers. So they had flourished exceedingly, adding acre to acre, sedately progressing from baron to earl, sending out many off-shoots, destined, they, too, to reap where they had not sown and gather where they had not strewn. Then when place holding became a depressed industry the family took to finance, since holding directorships and drawing fat fees therefor, seemed almost the same thing as holding a sinecure or two. Unhappily, it hadn't worked out quite like that. More than once unscrupulous persons had taken advantage of the Hoyle aristocratic indifference to detail that they expected subordinates to attend to. Also, the trade, profession, or occupation of landlord had in its turn become something of a depressed industry. True, as in the days of Carlyle, if a tenant plucked two nettles to make soup, then of those nettles the landlord could still claim one for himself. But to-day there wasn't always a tenant to do the required plucking. Alternatively, as the lawyers say, the market for plucked vegetation of all kinds was sometimes so bad that even transport costs could not be covered.