Secrets Can't be Kept: A Bobby Owen Mystery

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.

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

“Nineteen forty-six starts off well with this specimen of the leisurely detailed school at its soundest, with an ending which … may yet chill your blood” San Francisco Chronicle

“A fine example of sound detective work” New York Times Book Review