Part of Series
Deep in bucolic Wychshire something dreadful is stirring … The disappearance of a club-footed and inquisitive youth leads to a tangle involving two instances of stolen jewels, a water-colour which may be the most remarkable picture ever painted … and eventually to the discovery of a body in a forest with ‘a smell of rotting, a smell of things decaying’. The scene abounds with the intense, the afflicted, and the darkly humorous in classic Punshon style. But the murderer himself is on a collision cause with fate – aided of course by Inspector Bobby Owen. Secrets Can’t be Kept was first published in 1944, the twentieth of the Bobby Owen mysteries, a series eventually including thirty-five novels. This edition features a new introduction by crime fiction historian Curtis Evans.
Author
Aka Robertson Halket. E.R. Punshon (Ernest Robertson Punshon) (1872-1956) was an English novelist and literary critic of the early 20th century. He also wrote under the pseudonym Robertson Halket. Primarily writing on crime and deduction, he enjoyed some literary success in the 1930s and 1940s. Today, he is remembered, in the main, as the creator of Police Constable Bobby Owen, the protagonist of many of Punshon's novels. He reviewed many of Agatha Christie's novels for The Guardian on their first publication.
