Mystery of Mr. Jessop

Who killed Mr. Jessop? Who stole the Fellows necklace? Who attacked Hilda May? The web of suspicion encompasses a dealer in ‘hot goods', respected jewellers, a millionaire, an ex-pugilist, a playboy, members of the nobility, a hard-boiled moll and a girl who could not forget her past.

All the clues are there, as the indefatigible Bobby Owen works his way through a real peasouper of a London mystery and pierces the fog – displaying not only magnificent analytical powers but and admirable courage in the face of danger.

Mystery of Mr. Jessop 
is the eighth of E.R. Punshon's acclaimed Bobby Owen mysteries, first published in 1937 and part of a series which eventually spanned thirty-five novels.

Although E.R. Punshon had a spotty publication record in the United States, where between 1933 and 1938 only six of his first ten Bobby Owen detective novels were picked up by American publishers (overall, merely twelve of the thirty-five novels in the Bobby Owen series, just over a third, ever appeared in hardcover in the US, a major reason for the rarity of these books on the collectors' market today), he was one of the most popular authors of classical detective fiction in Great Britain, where his novels were published by the noted firm Victor Gollancz. In the 1930s he became a member of the Detection Club and his books were favorites of his club colleagues Dorothy L. Sayers and Milward Kennedy, in the Thirties successive mystery reviewers for the influential
Sunday Times
.

Also numbering among Punshon's English readership was the beloved humorist P.G. Wodehouse, a great fan of detective and thriller fiction (see William A.S. Sarjeant's 1987
The Mystery Fancier
article “P.G. Wodehouse as Reader of Crime Stories.”) In Wodehouse's 1938 novel
The Code of the Woosters
, we find that Bertie Wooster himself is a Punshon devotee. In the novel Bertie divulges that he, like many another Thirties mystery fan, relishes curling up with a good crime tale: “A cheerful fire was burning in the grate, and to while away the time I pulled the armchair up and got out the mystery story I had brought with me from London. As my researches in it had already shown me, it was a particularly good one, full of crisp clues and meaty murders, and I was soon absorbed.” Bertie's later reference to this mystery story leaves no doubt that the tale is Punshon's
Mystery of Mr. Jessop
, published in England the previous year. Tasked with discovering where Stephanie “Stiffy” Byng may have hidden a small, brown, leather-covered notebook, purloined from Gussie Fink-Nottle, Bertie finds inspiration from the pages of
Jessop
(page 151 of the Gollancz edition, to be exact), quoting a Scotland Yard superintendent's pronouncement concerning the whereabouts of “every woman's favorite hiding-place”.

As the admiring Bertie Wooster attests,
Mystery of Mr. Jessop
indeed offers detective fiction fans a rich repast of satisfying mystery. Like
Crime at Guildford
(1935) and
Proceed with Caution
(1937), contemporary mysteries by Punshon's Detection Club colleagues Freeman Wills Crofts and John Rhode (Cecil John Charles Street), Punshon's intensively plot-driven
Mystery of Mr. Jessop
concerns nefarious criminal activities, including murder, implicating a prominent firm of jewelers. The novel opens with a police raid in progress on The Towers, the Victorian villa residence of Timothy Thomas (“T.T.”) Mullins, a notorious stolen goods receiver. (The Towers is located in the imaginary London borough of Brush Hill, a neighborhood that plays a prominent role in two previous Bobby Owen mysteries,
Mystery Villa
and
Death of a Beauty Queen
.) The raid, in which Bobby is participating, is led by Scotland Yard's Superintendent Ulyett, Bobby's former mentor Superintendent Mitchell, last mentioned (briefly) in
Death Comes to Cambers
(1935), evidently having retired. The Yard has been informed that a fabulous diamond necklace consigned by its owner, American film siren Fay Fellows (star of the Hollywood hits
Rich Man's Baby
and
Millionaire's Sweetie
), to a London firm of jewelers, Jessop & Jacks, in order that its sale may be arranged, has instead gone missing; and it is suspected that T. T. Mullins is on the verge of receiving the pilfered sparklers at The Towers. The raid quickly devolves into a fiasco, however. No fabulous diamonds are found at The Towers, but instead the body of a man, only just shot dead; and this dead man is Mr. Jessop, a partner in Jessop & Jacks and the very individual who informed the police that Fay Fellows' necklace had been stolen.

This unexpected turn of events plunges Bobby and Superintendent Ulyett into a baffling brouhaha of double enigmas: who snaffled the diamond necklace and who snuffed out Mr. Jessop? The Yard investigation uncovers a goodly number of suspects for both crimes, starting with the smarmily mendacious T.T. Mullins himself. Punshon's plot is intricately developed, with, as that noted mystery fancier Bertie Wooster indicated, a series of enticingly crisp material clues (including a copy of an illustrated weekly, some missing pages of Saturday football results, a wealthy American's monogrammed cigars and the torn tip of a rubber glove), and should appeal greatly to puzzle enthusiasts; yet there also is much of interest in Punshon's writing and his characters. As Milward Kennedy noted in his review of Jessop in the
Sunday Times
, the events in the novel are “related with the drily humorous touch which we expect from E.R. Punshon, and with his accustomed skill in portraiture.” Once again Punshon includes some fine touches of social satire, especially after the haughty Duke of Westhaven and his baubles-bedazzled wife enter the case. Superintendent Ulyett, an ardent Tory, is so deferent to the aristocracy's prerogatives, as he imagines them, that he is rather at a loss over how to handle a murder case involving a duke and duchess. Consequently he delegates these august personages to Bobby, whom, he has heard, comes from the top drawer himself (word gets round about these things), even though Bobby protests that his uncle, Lord Hirlpool, is “only an earl” and “practically bankrupt” at that. Some of the novel's most amusing exchanges on class and politics take place between the conservative superintendent and his more iconoclastic sergeant:

Punshon portrays the topical subject of the rise of fascism and communism in Thirties England through a character who over the course of the novel migrates from the one ideology to the other before finally becoming disaffected with both, suggesting that in the author's view there was a fundamental interchangeability between these illiberal totalitarian political faiths:

Modern readers of
Mystery of Mr. Jessop
can reflect, if they are so minded, on just how much the world has changed in the second decade of the twenty-first century; or they can simply enjoy what is a cracking good mystery. As Milward Kennedy put it, E.R. Punshon “has once again supplied us with a puzzle which is also a first-rate story.”

Curtis Evans

 

Along Chesters Street, which runs its full length by the west side of Lonesome Fields Common, the furniture van lumbered clumsily on its slow way. On its roof, an old-fashioned mangle with heavy wooden rollers wobbled dangerously, restrained only by a loosely tied rope from toppling over into the street. Next to it a horsehair sofa, such as our fathers and our mothers loved, held up its four legs into the air, as if in dumb protest against the cruelty of fate that had driven it from the place of honour in the drawing-room to a doubtful perch on a van roof, without so much as even a shred of cover against the lightly falling rain that was turning this dull London Saturday evening into a misty night. On the tail-board balanced a sickly looking aspidistra, apparently nearly forgotten during the loading of the van and then hurriedly gathered up at the last moment but not thought worthy of the reopening of the van. By its side sat a burly person enveloped in an enormous green baize apron, a sack drawn over his head to protect him from the drizzle. He was smoking a short clay pipe, and he stared out into vacancy with the blank indifference of a man for whom, between the jobs of packing and unpacking, life held little of interest.

Evidently a family whose roots went back into the dim Victorian past effecting a change of residence.

The street was not well lighted, and the falling rain, the mist drifting in from the common, the oncoming night, threw a dim veil around, through which the few passers-by, the big old-fashioned houses each standing aloof in its own grounds, an occasional stray passing vehicle, all loomed up, vaguely indistinct, as though half proclaiming, half withdrawing, the testimony of their presence. With many of the inhabitants this bad lighting of their street was a perennial grievance, but somehow repeated complaints to the borough council produced no effect. Improvement was always promised but never carried out. There seemed mysterious opposing influences, a kind of “hidden hand” operating in the background. Rumour said that this was because some of the youthful inhabitants of the borough, including some whose parents were influential councillors, found the obscurity prevailing in the long, straight street resulted in their being able to use it for trying out their motor-cycles and their sports cars with less risk of possible complainants seeing their registration numbers.

Probably that explanation was worth little. Motorcycles seemed to go banging up and down this street with no unusual frequency. Another, perhaps more likely, theory – since, after all, the saying that “money talks” is as valid for borough councils as for other bodies and persons – points out that Chesters Street has very sadly come down in the world. Its big early Victorian houses, all with unnecessary basements, all planned on the assumption that domestic help would remain cheap and frequent, all void of such conveniences as a hot-water supply or central heating, boasting at best but one bathroom, and that generally tucked away in a dark and inconvenient corner, as something not quite proper, were now either vacant or let off at the rate of a family a floor, with no restriction upon lodgers. An additional disadvantage, too, was that, abutting, as they did at the rear, on the common, they afforded many facilities to the enterprising burglar. It used at one time to be a local joke among the police that no London burglar considered himself out of his apprenticeship till he had broken into at least three Chesters Street houses.

De Montfort House, for example, past which the furniture van was now slowly lumbering, had at one time been occupied by a well-known financier, whose magnificent garden-parties had been the talk of London, had indeed transferred to themselves in their heyday all the glamour and the prestige of Mayfair, then in the height of its glory before sacrilegious hands had been laid even upon Park Lane itself. Since the financier's arrest and trial, and sentence to a term of penal servitude, the house had remained empty, and even the notice-board “To be Let or Sold,” whereon the man in the green baize apron turned now a lack-lustre and indifferent eye, seemed to have given up hope as, half obliterated by wind and rain, it drooped sadly and unsteadily earthwards.

The next house, The Towers, was an exception to the general air of shabby depression pervading the street. For many years it had been occupied by a prosperous City man who had been born there, who had hoped to die there, but whose family, by long, persistent effort, aided by a timely burglary or two, had finally succeeded in uprooting him to what was at that time the novelty of a block of West End flats. After having remained empty for some years, it had been let to, and was still occupied by, a Mr. Timothy Thomas Mullins. Mr. Mullins was not much known in the neighbourhood. It seemed he liked privacy. He took no part in the life of the borough; but, then, few of the residents in London suburbs do interest themselves in local affairs. He described himself as “Import and Export Agent”; it was understood he had an office in the City, though no one knew exactly where, and certainly his attendance at it seemed somewhat irregular. At any rate, he appeared to be very comfortably off. The house had a prosperous air. The grounds, between one and two acres in extent, were well kept up, especially in the front of the house, which stood well back from the road, wherefrom it was further screened by what could almost be called a labyrinth of trees and shrubs, planned, planted, and maintained by a well-known firm of landscape gardeners. Inmates of the house might well have thought themselves living in the heart of the country, with what looked like the outskirts of a forest before them and the open expanse of the common behind; and incautious visitors, following the broad gravelled path that seemed to lead from the entrance-gate to the house, were apt to find themselves conducted to what once had been the stable yard and was now only a vacant space before the garage. Such visitors had often to retrace their steps to the inconspicuous turning screened by a hawthorn copse that did in fact lead to the front entrance. Mr. Mullins always thought it a good joke when his visitors were caught into making this blunder, and for his part, if he wanted to proceed on foot to the street, he took a short cut from a side-door through a gap in the hawthorn copse to the path used by tradespeople and others on their way to the back premises.