Part of Series
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club May Forbes, forty plus and single, visited Broomstick Common four nights each week to feed the feral cats. It was during one of these visits that she happened to see a masked man suspiciously carrying a spade. Filled with fear for her safety, she accidentally went in the opposite direction and ended up at the Mettlesome Horse, a local establishment where the renowned lawyer, Arthur Crook, happened to be enjoying a drink at the bar. I knew Providence had some reason for making me wallow in that sea of slope, Crook thought as he listened to her story. So when the body of pretty eighteen-year-old Linda Myers was found buried on the Common, he was convinced of it. Then, May Forbes knew what she had seen—and she knew, too, that the murderer had seen her, and that her turn would come next . . . A number of people had good reason for wishing the girl dead, Crook discovered, when he undertook the defense of the man the police had accused. He was soon to realize that someone wanted him dead too. Subsequently, May Forbes, who had spent her entire life working happily at the nearby draper's shop, vanished during her lunch break and never returned. Death Wears a Mask (AKA Mr. Crook Lifts the Mask) takes the ubiquitous Mr. Crook from his beloved London to a village community, where he finds that murder is spelt the same way wherever you come across it.
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.
