Music Tells All: A Bobby Owen Mystery

“Gets on your nerves, doesn’t it? I mean, that playing of hers. I’ve never heard anything like it.”

“I haven’t either,” Bobby said.

Bobby Owen (now ‘temporary-acting-junior-under-deputy-assistant-commissioner’ of the C.I.D.) and his wife Olive are house-hunting. Finding the perfect country home, every prospect pleases … until they meet their neighbours, including the odd, piano-playing Miss Bellamy, and Mr. Fielding, whose jollity is unsettling. The incessant piano music seems to jar on everyone, and Bobby Owen even wonders if the recent murder of a stranger might have been provoked by it. The true significance of the music, and what it has to do with a recent jewellery theft, is at the heart of a classic mystery set in the English countryside.

Music Tells All was first published in 1948, the twenty-fourth 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