Part of Series
Laura Verity, tired of life, decides to rent a very isolated cottage in the countryside. On arriving there in the darkness in the middle of the storm, she is shocked to find evidence that there is somebody else in the house. Shortly afterwards she discovers a body of a young woman, strangled to death, on the bed. Terrified, in the morning she hurries into the nearest market town to report the crime, only to find the police dubious about her claims - particularly when they return to the cottage with her and find no body. Only Arthur Crook, a dishevelled lawyer she encounter, is ready to believe her. He suggests that she is now in grave danger from the murderer and persuades her to move to a large, busy hotel in Brighton where she will be safer. The determined Verity perseveres in trying to solve the mystery, assisted at first in an offhand way by Crook. Newspaper publicity at last draws the police into the case, and with Crook's advice they find a body hidden in the well of the cottage. It soon proves to be not the corpse of the missing young woman, but the cottage's previous owner. To add to the confusion Miss Verity has herself now vanished, with Crook concerned that she has fallen into the hands of the murderer.
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.
