Part of Series
JULIA ROSS had a dreadful premonition about the new job for which she was applying. But she was hungry and lonely and out of work. Otherwise, she would never have rung the door-bell of that dark, forbidding house at 30 Henriques Square. And when she did, it was too late to retrace her steps, too late to avoid the strange little old woman in red, too late to escape the fateful net about to close in on her. Next morning Julia Ross had vanished completely, as if by magic into thin air! A few days later notice of her death appeared in a London paper But a young man, with whom she used to dine, and Arthur Crook, eccentric lawyer, were skeptical, persistent and patient enough to find sometime later a young woman of another name, halfway across England, being slowly driven to insanity and death.
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.
