Bobby Owen 28 The Secret Search

“There’s a spot of trouble this morning. Old gentleman found dead in his bath.”

Bobby answered: “there may be one chance in a million it’s natural death.”

When the notorious gangster Cy King was imprisoned thanks to Commander Bobby Owen’s investigation, he spent a good deal of time talking about avenging himself. Now Cy’s out of jail, linked to a notorious London nightclub owner, while a man impersonating Bobby has been spotted snooping around in a remote London suburb. The same suburb, as it happens, where a young woman, recently arrived from Canada, has seemingly vanished into thin air. All Bobby’s investigations lead to the unassuming borough of Southam, where the disappearance of Elizabeth Smith is compounded by the sudden death of a respectable old man. Cy keep dodging around in the background of the case, but can Bobby bring it home to the old villain – or find an alternative solution?

The Secret Search , a classic golden age whodunit, is the twenty-eighth novel in the Bobby Owen Mystery series, originally published in 1951. This new edition features an introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans, and a selection of E.R. Punshon’s prolific Guardian reviews of other golden age mystery fiction.

“What is distinction? … in the works of Mr. E.R. Punshon we salute it every time.”--Dorothy L. Sayers

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.