At that moment the door opened and a deep, harsh, husky voice said:
“Discussing my murder, are you?”
Bobby Owen of Scotland Yard and his wife Olive are busy bargain-hunting in a famous London department store. But a shopping expedition nearly turns into a crime scene when Olive discovers a necklace stuffed in her handbag. The plot thickens when it transpires it was placed there by one Lord Newdagonby – whose stout denial of the act is swiftly followed by a fatal knife blow to a prominent scientist. The meaning of this locked-room murder, and its connection to a dilettante inventor, a disrespectful daughter, and the pearls in Olive’s bag, form one of Bobby’s most puzzling investigations.
Everybody Always Tells, a classic golden age whodunit, is the twenty-seventh novel in the Bobby Owen Mystery series, originally published in 1950. 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
About the author
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.