Part of Series
This is the nineteenth in Gilbert's long-running series featuring the unscrupulous London solicitor Arthur Crook, one of the more unorthodox detectives of the Golden Age. In the spring of 1946, shortly after the Second World War the domineering Lady Bate came to live at the Downs, built by the eccentric Col. Anstruther many years before. War conditions made it necessary for the Colonel's daughter to take in paying guests, but only Lady Bate knew the secret of her past life and the key to her mysterious hermit-like existence. When, in due course, Lady Bate is found dead, a chance remark puts Arthur Crook on the right track, which he follows—but at the risk of his life! Lady Bate's murder threatens to unravel secrets best kept buried. In Death in the Wrong Room, the talented Anthony Gilbert has written a first-rate detective story at once mystifying and well-constructed. It is a story which the legion of Crime Club readers will thoroughly enjoy.
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.
