Part of Series
In a small English town, family conflict can be murder... Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club If the bus hadn't been in an accident . . . if Dinah James hadn't been late . . . if it hadn't been for the silver pencil . . . everything might have happened very differently. In any event there was a murder, an arrest, a conviction; conclusive evidence as the prosecution and the jury very reasonably thought. When spinster Emily Foss, who ran the haberdashery, was found bludgeoned to death, the silver pencil that had surely been in her purse that night was found in brash young Lennie Hunter's possession, it was he who was to be hanged for the crime. To clear his name, Hunter's fiancée brings in Detective Arthur Crook who has some very lively explanations of his own as to what sort of evidence he considers conclusive. He charges into the case with his old bounce and vitality; discrepancies and new suspicions begin to emerge. Soon Crook discovers that the victim was not on good terms with her nephew, his wife, or many others in the small English town where she lived. Faced with a maze of hidden motives, Crook must contrive against the clock to trap the real murderer. 'No author is more skilled at making a good story seem brilliant' Sunday Express
Author
Anthony Gilbert was the pen name of Lucy Malleson an English crime writer. She also wrote non-genre fiction as Anne Meredith , under which name she also published one crime novel. She also wrote an autobiography under the Meredith name, Three-a-Penny (1940). Her parents wanted her to be a schoolteacher but she was determined to become a writer. Her first mystery novel followed a visit to the theatre when she saw The Cat and the Canary then, Tragedy at Freyne, featuring Scott Egerton who later appeared in 10 novels, was published in 1927. She adopted the pseudonym Anthony Gilbert to publish detective novels which achieved great success and made her a name in British detective literature, although many of her readers had always believed that they were reading a male author. She went on to publish 69 crime novels, 51 of which featured her best known character, Arthur Crook. She also wrote more than 25 radio plays, which were broadcast in Great Britain and overseas. Crook is a vulgar London lawyer totally (and deliberately) unlike the aristocratic detectives who dominated the mystery field when Gilbert introduced him, such as Lord Peter Wimsey. Instead of dispassionately analyzing a case, he usually enters it after seemingly damning evidence has built up against his client, then conducts a no-holds-barred investigation of doubtful ethicality to clear him or her. The first Crook novel, Murder by Experts, was published in 1936 and was immediately popular. The last Crook novel, A Nice Little Killing, was published in 1974. Her thriller The Woman in Red (1941) was broadcast in the United States by CBS and made into a film in 1945 under the title My Name is Julia Ross. She never married, and evidence of her feminism is elegantly expressed in much of her work.
