“What happens, ” Bobby asked, “when a woman with an irresistible attraction for men, and the man with an irresistible attraction for women, meet? When glamour meets glamour . . . ?”
“Lummy, ” said the superintendent.
A seemingly innocent young woman has disappeared, presumably to elope with an unscrupulous lothario. Despite his wife Olive’s urging, Met Commander Bobby Owen is originally reluctant to get involved in a seemingly personal matter. But he soon finds his professional whiskers twitching when he discovers the cad in the case is a former suspect in a knife murder. Before long Bobby discovers a new murder scene – plenty of blood, but strangely no corpse …
So Many Doors, a classic golden age whodunit, is the twenty-sixth novel in the Bobby Owen Mystery series, originally published in 1949. 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.