Part of Series
A Mr. Crook Mystery, from the Author of Death in the Blackout. From inside front cover: No wonder they called Mereshire "The Village That God Forgot!" For over it, like an ominous pall, hung the Curse of the Clevelands—the curse that struck with uncanny force, generation after generation. Always the eldest son of the Earl of Cleveland kept an appointment with Death—one was drowned, one shot, one poisoned, one killed in battle. And then "it" struck Edmund Oliver, who was found at the bottom of a quarry, his neck broken. Was "it" the Curse—or the bloody hands of the village ne'er-do-well, Tom Grigg? Then, years later, Tom Grigg dares to return—and he is murdered! Are these two deaths—a generation apart—connected in any way? That's what Arthur Crook, that solid sleuth, wants to know. The Curse is understandable—it was born of greed—but why should anyone want to get rid of a penniless fugitive? Had he known a secret that someone had to silence? When the police arrest the victim's elderly aunt, Mr. Crook simply must ferret out the answers—or eat that brown bowler of his. The victim was certainly deserving of death, but not the hard, cruel death he found. No one deserved that ...At first, the killer goes unsuspected. Someone else would pay the price for the crime - an innocent woman would pay and the murderer was willing to arrange other, more 'accidental' deaths to ensure it ...until solicitor/detective Arthur Crook steps in. It was sheer luck that caused Arthur Crook, taking an unwanted holiday in November in the little Mereshire Village of Bridges St. Mary, to stumble on a body where no body had any right to be. It was Crook who hardily undertook to work for the defense of the old woman arrested for the crime, who followed the trail from Kings Fossett to Bishop Cleveland, and thence to London; who unraveled the mystery of the strange girl, Stella Reed; who attacked the murderer with his own weapons and at the eleventh hour, when everything seemed lost, who produced the final iota of evidence that brought the criminal to book. In one of his most baffling cases, Crook only has two guiding principles: his client is always innocent and, come hell or high water, he always gets his man.
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.
