The Clock in the Hatbox (1939) by Anthony Gilbert

The Clock in the Hatbox (1939) is an early title in the Arthur Crook series, only the sixth of fifty-some novels, written by "Anthony Gilbert," a pseudonym of Lucy Beatrice Malleson, who distinguished herself from her contemporaries by blending (domestic) suspense with a formal detective plot – resulting in some unusually-structured mystery novels (e.g. Something Nasty in the Woodshed, 1942). As unconventional as Gilbert's approach to plotting is her morally ambiguous lawyer-detective, Crook, who was accurately described by Nick Fuller as having something of "the gusto and cynicism of Sir Henry Merrivale himself."

The Clock in the Hatbox appeared on my radar after coming across it on a list, "Recommendations by Nick Fuller," originally posted on the GAD group, which listed this book as the only recommendation under Gilbert's name. John Norris, of Pretty Sinister Books, published a laudatory review of the book last year. Concluding that Gilbert's "unusual treatment" of the detective story, courtroom drama and Hitchcockian suspense culminated in a "mindblowing crime novel." A "landmark mystery novel" that "for some reason is never mentioned in the many studies of the detective novel." There were a number of other reviews that really enticed me.

My reason for referring back to their opinion on The Clock in the Hatbox is that, halfway through the story, I began to suspect my own opinion was going to be a contrarian one. And then that ending happened!

The story opens with the trail of Viola Ross, who stands accused of having murdered her husband, Teddy Ross, a schoolteacher who was smothered to death and the clue that landed her in the docks was the bedside alarm clock – which was found inside a hatbox in the closet. Whoever put the clock in the hatbox was likely the same person who placed a pillow over the victim's face. And had forgotten to replace it.

Viola was only twenty-three when she married Ross, a man twice her age, but the marriage provided Viola with security and Teddy with wife. However, as the years passed, Ross become "the complete domestic tyrant" and alienated his son from a previous marriage, Harry Ross, who refused to become a teacher like his father. Ross resented that Viola sided with his son and even began to harbor suspicions that they were having an affair. Predictably, he died the night before he was going to change his will.

So the police had a motive and all of the evidence argued against Viola, as well as public opinion, but a death sentence is delayed when the jury was unable to come to an unanimous decision – deadlocked by a single juror. The result is a hung jury and a new trial date is set.

The lone holdout in the jury is an aspiring novelist, Richard Arnold, absolutely convinced of Viola's innocence and is determined to rescue her from the gallows.

A mission supported by Arnold's fiance, Bunty, but her support begins to slowly wane when a threatening letter arrives demanding that she tells her boyfriend "he has twenty-four hours left in which the change his mind." However, this threat only works only worked as an incentive to carry on the investigation, because Arnold is clearly making someone nervous. Someone who doesn't want anyone looking closer at the murder, which is where the Hitchcockian suspense and thriller-ish elements of the plot come into play.

There are several attempts to kill Arnold, one of them employing the gun-with-a-string trick, but a second tragedy happens when the fumes of a tampered bathroom heater killed a completely innocent man. A man who died in Arnold's place!

During his investigation, Arnold engages Arthur Crook, a shrewd lawyer of "the most enviable repute," but Crook is only peripherally involved in the case until he pulls the rug from underneath the reader at the end. Until then, Crook makes a couple of appearances to warn Arnold not to meddle and give their prey the time to gather "sufficient rope" to hang himself. A warning that was duly ignored.

A note for the curious: Crook quotes Gilbert's original series-detective, Scott Egerton, a rising politician, who appeared in only ten novels until Crook replaced him in the mid-1930s. Towards the end, Crook tells Arnold how Egerton always used to say "the last trump always lies with fate and she bein' female, there's no telln' how she'll play it." I always like it when mystery writers acknowledge, one way or another, that their various series-detectives live in the same fictional universe.

Somewhere around the halfway mark of the story, I began to slowly doubt the judgment of my fellow mystery enthusiasts. After all, the murderer's identity looked to be rather obvious, especially to seasoned mystery readers, which would have hardly justified the lavish praise. Don't get me wrong, it would still have been a well-written, cleverly put together detective novel with a good play on the least-likely-suspect gambit, but I began to think that the book had been overpraised – which is when I arrived at the twist in the story's tail. A triumphant ending that can be likened to Anthony Berkeley's Jumping Jenny (1933).

I also understand now why Norris liked the book so much, because The Clock in the Hatbox reminded me of Joan Fleming's Polly Put the Kettle On (1952), which Norris glowingly reviewed. The books are as similar as they differ, mainly in the approach they take to the plot, but, in the end, the similarities really are striking. If you like the one, you'll probably like the other.

All in all, The Clock in the Hatbox is a classic textbook example of what it is that attracts me to these cunningly cut gems from the genre's Golden Era. I went in with expectations that were, perhaps too high, but began to get slightly disappointed as the explanation appeared to be obvious in spite of the author's to cover it up as inconspicuously as possible – only to learn at the end that I was supposed to think that all along! The Clock in the Hatbox is without question one of Gilbert's best detective novels and deserves to better known.

And speaking of detective stories that (probably) deserve to be better known, I recently got my hands on a genuinely unknown collection of short detective stories. They look very promising and, if they're any good, I might have actually unearthed something interesting. I think there are even some impossible crime stories in this collection! So that surprise collection will be next.

Under a Cloud of Suspicion

"A little malice adds a certain savor to life."

- Mr. Treves (Agatha Christie's Towards Zero, 1944)

Over a period of half a century, Lucy Beatrice Malleson wrote nearly seventy detective-and suspense novels and employed a handful of pennames, but the one that garnered her the most success was that of "Anthony Gilbert" and she used the name for the fifty-some books about her series-character – a morally ambiguous lawyer named Arthur Crook. A likable antihero cut from the same cloth as Craig Rice's John J. Malone and Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason. 

 

I've only read six of her novels, a mere fraction of her complete output, but my sampling showed how she danced between domestic suspense (e.g. Something Nasty in the Woodshed, 1942) and the formal detective story format (e.g. Death Knocks Three Times, 1949). My impression is that she was more gifted when writing tales of suspense, but was not entirely inept when handling a puzzle-oriented plot. And that brings us to the subject of today's blog-post.

She Shall Die (1961) came late in Malleson's career and as a rule I tend to be little hesitant when it comes to detective novels published after 1959, but this particular title has been on my wishlist ever since I came across a short review by Nick Fuller on the GADWiki – who described it as a "really good" mystery with a "well-clued Agatha Christie-type solution." He also accurately described Crook as having "something of the gusto of H.M." So it was about time I finally knocked this title of my list.

Hattie Savage is the attractive "daughter of a rich tycoon" and she has a knack for attracting both men and trouble, which eventually lands her in a police cell on suspicion of murder.

The trouble began for Hettie when a young man, Richard Sheridan, proposed to her, but she rejected him and Sheridan did not take that very well. Sheridan told Hattie he would not be able to live if she did not accept him and threatened to put "a bullet through his brain," but instead of walking away from the situation Hattie did the unthinkable – she handed him sleeping tablets and told how many it would take to kill himself. So the next morning there's a policeman on her parents doorstep with the news that Sheridan had been found dead in his bed. The doctor had no doubt that he died from taking an overdose of barbiturates.

As to be expected, Hattie receives very little public sympathy and at the inquest "the coroner barely concealed his sense of outrage," but the jury returned an open verdict and she's free to go. She was not cleared from any wrong doings in the court of public opinion and within twenty-four hours of the verdict the anonymous letters-and telephone calls began, which made her decide to escape the limelight and "flee to Paris." However, the real trouble began to manifest itself during her absence.

During the inquest, Marguerite Grey, "a saleswoman in the glove department of Booties," came forward and claimed to have been engaged to Sheridan, which would throw serious doubt on Hattie's story, but Marguerite is unable to produce any proof and nothing was done with statement. But the small cast-of-characters who surrounded Hattie and Sheridan had not seen the last of her.

Marguerite is determined to wriggle her way into the community and begins with Sheridan's aunt, Miss Alison Sheridan, who runs a popular restaurant and she is the first to discover that the girl is a regular snake in the grass – one with a penchant for blackmail. Marguerite knows something about her dead nephew that has to be kept a secret. Miss Sheridan has to allow Marguerite into her home, but her blackmailing antics doesn't stop there and even tries to sink her claws into Hattie when she returns with a husband in tow.

However, Marguerite had "the natural vanity of the blackmailer" and it never occurred to her "she might be in danger herself." Unsurprisingly, someone ends up planting a knife between her shoulder blades.

U.S. edition

Hattie is placed under arrest and her new husband, Philip Cobb, rushes off to get the help of Arthur Crook, "that rogue elephant among lawyers," who only appears in the last five chapters, but that's all he needs to clear up this mess and even provides a false solution based on A.E.W. Mason's At the Villa Rose (1910) – which succeeded in completely throwing me off my game for a moment. The false solution was presented very convincingly and briefly assumed I had been foolishly trailing a well-placed red herring. Luckily, I was not entirely wrong about the explanation.

I correctly figured out what was at the heart of both deaths (spotted all the clues!) and this allowed me to identity the murderer, but got a thing or two wrong about how this information fitted the overall picture. Still, I was more right than wrong and loved the level of fairness that allowed me to play along on an equal footing with Crook.

She Shall Die may be a relatively short domestic tale with a small, intimate cast-of-characters, but the structure of the plot and placing of the clues is what one would expect from the Grandest of the Golden Age. On top of that, there are certain components of the plot that show some strokes of originality. So to know that such a classically-styled, fairplay mystery novel was published during that dark decade for our genre, the sixties, was very heartwarming, because there are not that many examples from the same period.

The only other (classical) examples I can think of are Robert van Gulik's The Red Pavilion (1961) and Helen McCloy's Mr. Splitfoot (1968). I'm sure there are a few more, but this was literary all I could think of at the moment.

However, while the plot burned and shimmered with all the brilliance of the 1930s, the cultural references clearly showed that the story was set in a completely different time. One of the characters mentioned they were living in "the shadow of the atom-bomb." Khrushchev gets a throw-away reference. A refugee committee hovers in the background and suspect they dealt with people who fled Eastern Europeans. A police sergeant is mourning the fact that "even the television had lined itself up with the wrong side," because they were giving away all the secrets of police work. I've always found these cultural and (now) historical references to be interesting ornaments on my detective stories.

Anyhow, She Shall Die is a well-written, fairly clued and soundly plotted detective novel that gives the reader all the room needed to arrive at the same conclusion as Crook, which should please every self-proclaimed armchair detective. I can therefore recommend the book to everyone who loves a fair shot at beating the detective to the solution. And you should be able to do it, if you're observant enough.

Well, let me cut-off this overlong review here and tell you that the next review will fall into the locked room-and impossible crime category, because I received some interesting titles in the mail this week. I just have to make a decision which one of those titles will be devoured first.

The Devil in the Summer-House

"Oh dear, I never realized what a terrible lot of explaining one has to do in a murder."

- Clarissa Hailsham-Brown (Agatha Christie's Spider's Web, 1954)

The collaboration between Dean Street Press, an independent publisher "devoted to revitalizing good books," and Curt Evans, genre historian and author of Masters of the "Hundrum" Mystery (2012), is arguably the best thing that happened to the forgotten detective story since the Rue Morgue Press and Crippen & Landru opened for business.

It's a collaborative effort that's slowly bringing E.R. Punshon's work back into circulation and republished, after close to a century of neglect, two mystery novels by Ianthe Jerrold – of which one, Dead Man's Quarry (1930), is a textbook example of a forgotten classic. And that's not just me saying that.

Annie Haynes is a mystery writer Evans first wrote about in 2013 and at the time he "knew of only two living persons," besides himself, "who had read any of her books." Thankfully, Dean Street Press will be adding her work to their expanding catalogue and Rupert Heath was kind enough to supply me with a review copy of The Crystal Beads Murder (1930), which was probably completed by "Anthony Gilbert" after Haynes untimely passing.

There are other persons of interest who could've completed the manuscript, but Evans made a compelling case as to why it might have been Gilbert.

I'll refrain from retracing parts of the introduction Evans wrote, but, if you want an idea of what kind of person Haynes was, there's a short, interesting foreword by one of her close friends, Ada Heather-Biggs – who mentioned Haynes once cycled "miles to visit the scene of the Luard Murder" and pushed "her way into the cellar of 39 Hilldrop Crescent, where the remains of Belle Elmore were discovered."

Unfortunately, "the last fifteen years of her life" Haynes "was in constant pain and writing itself was a considerable effort" with "her only journeys being from her bedroom to her study," but "this struggle with cruel circumstances" was "lightened by the warmth of friendship existing between Miss Haynes and her fellow authors."

Well, that dark cloud has long since passed and I'll be doing my part now in lifting Haynes from the memory hole of history by taking a look at her last novel.

The Crystal Beads Murder is the last recorded case in the Inspector Stoddard series and has a plot clustering around the murder of the odious William Saunderson, a professional moneylender and part-time blackmailer, who's shot to death in the summer-house of Lord and Lady Medchester – during an evening of drawing-and billiard room activities characteristic of the early 20th century.

A full house of potential suspects moved about the premise and garden, which isn't exactly helpful to the police, even though "an alibi is the easiest thing in the world to fake" and "the least satisfactory of defenses."

There is, however, one tangible clue, "three crystal beads finked together by a thin, gold chain," which was found upon a second examination of the body, but a superintendent swears it wasn't there during the initial inspection of the victim. So did the murderer, or someone else, returned to the scene of the crime and left a "clue," of sorts?

In this respect, the first half of the book often reminded me of the typical, 1920s mystery novel, but without excessive littering of monogrammed handkerchief and train tickets – which is a huge plus for a mystery writer who wrote and published practically her entire body of work during that decade. It's only to be expected that, stylistically, Haynes' work reflected the genre, as it was in the 1920s, which made the change of author especially noticeable in the second-half.

A policeman is mortally wounded by a bullet in the second leg of the story and his dying process, and aftermath, isn't the emotionless affair that the murder of Saunderson was.

Saunderson had a wife turning up out of nowhere. A wife who admitted her husband "had his faults" and didn't "see why he should be done in and nobody punished," but her main interest is the possible inheritance that could come her way in lieu of an official will. The portrayal of the emotionally devastated widow of the poor policeman is the complete opposite.

There's a genuine sense of lost and even their home reflects this sudden, painful lost: the home looked "so familiar, and yet with life turned gray and the pivot of her very existence removed, it all looked flat and unresponsive," followed by, "the clock on the mantelpiece that she and Bill had bought when he got promoted to sergeant still ticked on with the same monotonous perseverance as ever, but it seemed somehow to be telling quite a different story." These brief snippets of grief really made me sympathize with the hangman.

If you link that with another plot-thread, involving a domestic intruder attempting to force a marriage, and you've got another indication that the mystery author might have been Anthony Gilbert – because it reflects the kind of domestic strains she specialized in when her own career took off (e.g. Something Nasty in the Woodshed, 1942).

I've got one, minor complaint, before I cut this overlong, rambling review short, which is the clue Stoddard uses to solve the case. It's a piece of evidence that’s sloppily overlooked by the police during their first investigation of the crime-scene and thrown in the inspectors lap by a passing tramp (Curt?!) and the policeman's widow, which prevents Stoddard from leaving an ever-lasting impression on the readers – and that's a shame since this was his last recorded case.

But, aside from that, Connoisseurs of Murder will find another interesting and exciting rediscovery from the Golden Age of Mysteries in Haynes and The Crystal Beads Murder. The book is slated for release in early October of this year.

Say It With Blood

"So many murders! Rather hard to do a lot of murders and get away with it, eh?" 

- Luke Fitzwilliam (Agatha Christie's Murder is Easy, 1939)

Lucy Beatrice Malleson left behind a literary portfolio, mainly under the penname "Anthony Gilbert," stuffed with crime novels often floating in the gray, misty borderland between suspense and mystery. I find them fascinating to read, even if they sometimes lacked that final, illuminating touch of a truly brilliant detective story, but Death Knocks Three Times (1949) goes a long way in that direction.

The starting point of Death Knocks Three Times is ornamented with the original set pieces, painted in shades of black and white, of the cliched image of the detective story, in which the sleuth of the piece arrives soaked from a cloudburst at a decaying mansion – where the specter of death stalks the musty corridors. Enter Arthur Crook, a notable criminal-lawyer and the British answer to Perry Mason, who seeks refuge at the home of the eccentric Colonel Sherren before the weather strands him in the countryside. The residence of the Colonel is indeed a mansion with hallways stretching into the dark unknown, but the place only gives a home to two people and the conveniences the house offers them are the same as when it was built. It still beats being stuck in a flooding and Crook goes on his way the next morning, however, this divergence from the norm doesn't mean the end of his involvement with the Colonel and his relatives.

After his return to London, Crook is summoned back to attend an inquest and hears the Colonel has broken his neck after the lid of the ancient bathtub came crashing down. The Colonel had received a visit from his nephew, John Sherren, a novelist of meager fame, but a motive seems to be lacking as the money passes to Colonel's servant, Bligh, and a slightly divided jury settles on a verdict of death by misadventure. Interestingly, one of John's two remaining relatives, aunt Isabel Bond, falls from a balcony one night after visiting her! And there was only one.

Aunt Clara is a stronger and far more independent minded woman than her late sister, Isabel, but the influx of threatening, hand-delivered letters and the arrival of her nephew, John, has her reaching for the help of a friend with an amateur-expertise in crime, Miss Frances Pettigrew. Connoisseurs in Crime, who, without saying, know their classics, will be tempted to draw a comparison with the name Francis Pettigrew, the lawyer-detective introduced in Cyril Hare's Tragedy at Law (1942), but her physical description is a grotesque parody of Mrs. Bradley with the behavior of a haggard Miss Marple. John first catches a glimpse of Miss Pettigrew in a bookstore where she's giving a standing lecture on murder, "naturally murder is simple, with weapons on all sides," and plotting detective stories, "why writers of detective stories have to employ mysterious poisons or sealed rooms or blowpipes... when bricks, bread-knives, coal-hammers and pairs of scissors are to be had for the asking and are at least as efficacious." And I gravely suspect Gilbert of sniping at Agatha Christie's Murder is Easy (1939) when John found himself locked up with Miss Pettigrew in a non-smoking compartment for the duration of the journey, which was similar to how Luke Fitzwilliam was (socially) chained on his train ride to Miss Fullerton, who suspected a mass-murderer was active in her home village of Wychwood.

Even the scarlet beetle, Mr. Crook, crawling back into the picture can't prevent the case from becoming increasingly complicated with the arrival of a blackmailer into the picture and more letters – climaxing with a death by poisoning at a very curious hotel resort. I think, once again, Gilbert was subtly poking fun at one of her fellow mystery writers. The death takes place in a locked hotel room and the maid said that she raised enough noise "to wake the dead." You do the math. By the way, this is not a locked room mystery in any shape or form. It would not have mattered to the outcome whether the doors were locked or not. This one should not have been in Adey's bibliography of the locked room mystery.

On the other hand, the identity of the murderer is inventive, even if the seasoned mystery reader won't have too much problem foreseeing the twist, but the way I stumbled to it is something (read: bizarre coincidence) I'm going to blame on the bogeyman of the mystery-sphere and that's all I can say without spoiling the solution. The solution, and ideas surrounding it, anticipate and foreshadow a rather interesting Agatha Christie novel, but, again, I can't go into details without spoiling even more detective stories.

Lets end with saying that Death Knocks Three Times, alongside Something Nasty in the Woodshed (1942), is the best and most rewarding Arthur Crook mystery I have read to date.

The Lure of Rest

"Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,

Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;

But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token..."

- Edgar Allan Poe (The Raven, 1845)

Mr. Arthur Crook is looking over the Record on the morning of April 14, 1947, when an advertisement, under the header "Rest and Refreshments," beckons his attention and gives a translation in his own words: "Rich dame wanted as sole payin' guest in a house in a lonely wood. No one else allowed over the threshold." Mrs. Emily Watson has read the same ad and is our damsel-in-distress in Anthony Gilbert's Die in the Dark (1947). 

Well, I have to admit, Mrs. Watson, a fifty-year old widow, doesn't match the image of a tormented maiden, kept imprisoned in a crumbling manor home, but that doesn't make her ordeal any less excruciating. Mrs. Watson has excellent reasons to assume that the people nearest to her are plotting to siege control of her estate, claiming that she has gone soft in the head, and the advertisement in the Record offers a temporary escape – as well as a mean to unsettling the plans of her money hungry nephew. Dr. Forrester and his wife, Mrs. Watson hosts, appear to be nice and understandable people, but before long, she begins to question the good intentions of the Forrester's and eventually even her own sanity.

Die in the Dark shares some interesting similarities with one of Gilbert's previous novels, Something Nasty in the Woodshed (1942), and I almost suspect Dark to be a re-write of Woodshed.  

  

Woodshed and Dark open with a newspaper advertisement, asking respectively for a spinster and a lodger, but they are both meant to lure a rich and lonely woman to a secluded spot. Woods that are reputedly haunted surround the houses. In Woodshed, it's the earthbound spirit of a woman and her ghostly appearance is actually relevant to the plot, while Dark briefly touched upon the parachutists who died over the forests during the war – never found and doomed to wander the woods forever. Something should've been done with that! Of course, once these women realize that they may've been safer had they gone to Camp Crystal Lake, they have to face whatever is lurking there... or being hidden from them. Woodshed explains itself, but Dark has an abandoned, dilapidating cottage, tucked away in the dark forest, where Mrs. Watson makes an unnerving discovery.

The two-part structure of Dark also reflects Woodshed, in which the first section can be read as a suspense story with an open ending and in the follow-up Arthur Crook tidies up the loose ends for the curious – as well as settling the score in his own particular way. Unfortunately, these aftermaths appear to be unable to carry the momentum from the first into the second part of the story, and perhaps that's because the style is a radical departure from the pure, suspenseful storytelling of the previous part. What I liked about the first part of Dark is that you're never quit sure if Mrs. Watson is the victim of a dark plot or of her own delusions and that was lacking in the second half of the novel.

All things considered, this was an engrossing story of suspense and even though it's not a classic example of its kind, you can still loose yourself in it for a couple of hours (only 150+ pages to cover) and I suspect that was Gilbert's plan all along.

Other Anthony Gilbert mysteries I have reviewed: 

Something Nasty in the Woodshed (1942)

Death at the Door (1944) 

The Scarlet Button (1944)

A Shelter from a Rainy Past

"Gave it all that I got
And started to knock
Shouted for someone
To open the lock
I just gotta get through the door."
- Gotta Knock a Little Harder.

Continuing my Anthony Gilbert reading binge, I snatched up a copy of Death at the Door (1944), which was originally published in the United Kingdom under the title He Came by Night, after coming across a micro synopsis that teased this novel as a locked room mystery. There's a bolted and barricaded door hampering an easy entrance into an hermitically sealed room, harboring the remains of a murdered man, but this one deviates from those put to use in the books by locked room artisans such as John Dickson Carr and Joseph Commings. But I am ahead of the story here.

This tale embarks at dusk, when Tom Grigg wanders into Mereshire, a picture-postcard example of the quiet beauty of the countryside that appears to be impervious to the march and progress of time, after an absence that stretched out for an entire generation – and the first person he drops in on is not exactly overcome by joyous emotions at the sight of his face. Tom Grigg is not someone who often receives invitations to family reunions and his motivation for coming back, after more than thirty years, has very little to do with nostalgic reasons and a lot with a murder charge that is looming over his head in the shape of a hangman's noose.

He demands from his auntie, a doting grandmother type named Mary Anna Manners, to accommodate him, but since relinquishing a room under her own roof to a fugitive of the law is out of the question she surreptitiously sneaks him into an abandoned, dilapidated church – which has a reputation of being haunted. Theoretically, he should've been as safe there as if he was hiding in the attic or basement of Scotland Yard, but apparently nobody clued him up on the fact that keeping your head down does not include dragging and rattling the family skeletons of the local gentry from their cupboards.  

A few days passed by unnoticed, when Arthur Crook, that lawyer-cum-detective who defends the innocent and always catches his man (even if he has to fabricate evidence to proof that person's guilt), cycles into the snoozing hamlet and wakes it up with his startling discovery of the body of Tom Grigg. The body was found in the vestry of the derelict church, with the door locked and barricaded from the outside, effectively turning it into an hermitically sealed space – in which a charcoal burner had greedily gobbled up the air and burped out noxious, suffocating fumes.

Tom Grigg had pounded his fists to a bloody mess on the unyielding door, but the pleas for salvation went lost in the cool, night-time air that he so desperately needed and even if he was heard it would've been presumed to be the eerie wailings of the tormented ghost. A very neat, cruel and inexplicable murder, but just as unfathomable as the circumstances in which the black sheep was killed is the person the police are tagging for this crime: Mary Anna Manners! 

What follows is a slow moving detective story, in which Arthur Crook tries to exonerate Mary Manners by giving the cupboards of the local aristocracy an early spring cleaning – which includes figuring out the reason why Tom left the village around the same time that the young heir apparent of that family and his rival in love broke his neck after tumbling down a quarry (although his death is ascribed to a curse that has plagued the family for generations and states the first son won't live to inherit the title and estate from his father). But he also falls back on his time-honored methods of duplicity to extract a confession from the murderer after having supplied this person with miles of rope.

Death at the Door managed to maintain a standard of quality through out the book, from the first lines to the final sentence, nonetheless, there remains more than enough room for improvement. The clueing remains sparse and the revelation is not entirely satisfactory. I also have yet to see the Agatha Christie-like brilliance ascribed to her by Nick Fuller, but hey, you have to be grateful for what you get – and there's improvement here as for as plot consistency is concerned. So hopefully the next one will not only be consistent, but also sport a brilliantly clued and staggering solution.

Along Came a Spider

"The cautious murderer, in his anxiety to make himself secure, does too much; and it is this excess of precaution that leads to detection. It happens constantly; indeed I may say that it always happens -- in those murders that are detected; of those that are not, we say nothing..."

- Dr. John Thorndyke (The Eye of Osiris, 1912).

According to the unwritten policy of this place, I should refrain from posting a succession of book reviews that riffles through the work of one particular author, but then again, nothing was really etched in stone – giving me leeway to indulge in a reading spree targeting the detective novels penned by Anthony Gilbert.

Anthony Gilbert was the masculine nom-de-plume of Lucy Malleson, a novelist with close to a hundred books to her credit, from mysteries to straight fiction, and part of the second wave of members to join the prestigious Detection Club, who nevertheless found herself consigned to biblioblivion. As far as I am able to determine, her stories have been out-of-print for decades and she's rarely referred to in the literature – most notably, perhaps, in recent publications. I think there are two, very common, reasons to explain this neglect of once popular mystery writers: a gross misconception of the genre or simple ignorance.

In case of the former, a writer is condemned to languish in obscurity as a punishment for something that is branded as a mortal sin in the eyes of the current establishment, such as a compulsive worship of the upper-class that mirrors their own preoccupation with the lower classes or an overemphasis on plotting, which are not strikes that can be held against Gilbert. 

The novels I have read, Something Nasty in the Woodshed (1942) and The Scarlet Button (1944), are not over plotted stories that dote on the upper classes – quite on the contrary! Money and a position in society are not the cloaked harbingers of a care free, prosperous life and even good people, such as the female protagonist from Something Nasty in the Woodshed, are not spared any hardships – in spite of a financial status. Not to mention the occasional, cynical observations on society that are stealthily dropped on the characters. There's also a willingness to experiment with the structure of the detective story, such as blending atmospheric suspense with police detection, which should speak to the interest of a contemporary reading audience.

So I think it's a safe, tentative conclusion that Anthony Gilbert was simply lost from popular view, after tripping over and slipping through the cracks of time, instead of being unjustly disregarded and scorned with malice aforethought – such as was the lot of John Rhode, Austin Freeman and Henry Wade. Ah, if only she had known that writing under a male pseudonym would proof to be a handicap in the 21st century.

Anyway, I have droned on long enough and it's time to take a look at The Scarlet Button, which is an interestingly constructed detective story as well as an exhibition of Gilbert's strengths and weaknesses that also gave acte de présence in the previous novel.

At the center of this carefully spun web of deceit, extortion and eventually murder sits James Chigwell, a master blackmailer in the tradition of Charles Augustus Milverton, who took a sadistic pleasure in taunting whoever he ensnarled in his web – and "clients" unwilling or simply incapable of playing along were faced with certain ruin and a trip down to grand central station to catch the final train of their lives. It was therefore only a matter of time before one of his regular contributors had enough and armed with a heavy walking stick young Kenneth "Ken" Jardine sets-out to squash the human spider, who fattened himself with the blood and misery of his clientele, but after sneaking into the abode of his tormenter he discovers that someone has beaten him to it – quite literarily!

Jardine escapes unscathed and unnoticed from the crime-scene without leaving traces of his presence, but still ends up in the docks facing a murder charge after courageously saving an innocent man from an uncomfortable fitting session with the hangman by divulging to the police that he was at the home of the now defunct spider not long after he was squashed – which proved that the hands of one Rupert Burk were unstained. But what he did was merely exchanging one equally innocent head for another to the public executioner and as a result one of his friends decides to consult a noted criminal-lawyer, Arthur Crook.

Arthur Crook is an amusing character, who's halfway between John J. Malone and Sir Henry Merrivale, with methods that are either somewhat questionable, highly unorthodox or downright amoral – which consists here of duplicity and supplying the murderer with enough rope to hang himself. In a way, this story can be read as a mockery of the assiduous, stereotypical storybook killer who only got caught because he had done too much, however, this is not a macabre send-up of the genre. It's a fairly dark story set against the blackouts of WWII and the brutal murder of Jardine's friend, a local working class girl, drives home the point that Gilbert was not an author of cozy mysteries.

The main problem and solution offered here are engaging and allowed for an interestingly constructed plot, but unable to fully deliver on its resolution due to a lack of an extended cast of viable suspects. This aspect of the solution could've been improved if simply more victims of Chigwell were introduced to do a danse macabre around his corpse and distract your attention away from the murderer. I actually dismissed this person out of hand (because it was too easy) and began to suspect a clever narrative device that would implicate an unknown X in a satisfactory manner – which made the actual solution a real letdown.

The Scarlet Button can be summed up as a nice try, in which the mismanagement of the central plot idea, which was not entirely without merit, crippled any chance it might have had at achieving some sort of status within the genre. However, don't assume that this is a thoroughly bad detective story, which is not the case as the build up to the solution was quite good, but the execution of the grand finale leaves a lot to be desired.

I hope that the next Arthur Crook novel will have a second-half that carries over the creative quality of the set-up, but first I will take a brief excursion into the dark middle ages of Paul Doherty's Hugh Corbett.

The Deceitful Cupid

Debbie: "Isn't he a lady killer!"

Gomez Addams: "Acquitted."

- Addams Family Values (1993).

Between the closing years of the 1920s and the start of the 1970s, Lucy Beatrice Malleson produced a torrent of detective and thriller stories under an array of different pennames, but the most successful ones appeared under the byline of Anthony Gilbert – and usually starred the criminal lawyer-cum-detective, Arthur Crook. Great name, eh? I have been wanting to sample them for a while, and had enough of them laying around the place to do so, but only just took a first crack at them after serendipitously stumbling over a copy of Something Nasty in the Woodshed (1942). It was simply impossible to let a book with such a spellbinding title languish on my to-be-read pile for even a single day!

Something Nasty in the Woodshed interlocks the plot of a suspenseful thriller, in which a predatory lady killer hunts the lonely hearts columns in search for inexperienced spinsters and gullible widows, with elements of detection – which in this particular case has nothing to do with uncovering the identity of the murderer, determining motives or figuring out how the foul deed was done, but what this individual has stashed away in the titular woodshed.

The characters who take center stage in this story are Agatha Forbes, a spinster, rapidly approaching middle-age, with a private income who gave up youth to take care of her father, and Edmund Durward, an attractive, charming young man and a professional seducer – who frequently trots overgrown pathways that usually lead to a cemetery where he disposes himself of yet another spouse who met with a unfortunate accident. It's never explicitly mentioned in the book how many wives he buried, but there were definitely more than one of them.

When the reader is introduced to Agatha Forbes, we meet a spinster of independent means who lives an emotionally isolated life ever since her father passed away. She fills some of her time with club activities, where she found one or two companions, but these shallow commitments failed to chase the loneliness from her heart – which prompts her one day to respond to a matrimonial advertisement in the lonely hearts column. The lonesome writer, who turns out to be Edmund Durward, is looking for a gentle woman, aged 35-42, of independent means who's not averse to a quiet life in the country and family ties are not essential in a prospective marriage. This description seems to have been written with the unsuspicious spinster in mind and naturally she receives an invitation to come visit this self-proclaimed lonely heart.

What ensues is an excellent suspense story, in which the deceivingly charming Edmund swoons the inexperienced Agatha off her feet to carry her into a wedding chapel and the couple installs themselves in his desolated house, which is habitually haunted by the ghost of a woman, in a remote village – where the blushing bride expects to spend a long, but uneventful, life with a loving husband at her side. However, as one month after another recedes from the calendar, her husband's tender caresses slowly turns into a strangle hold and as his control over her money increases the moment that a doctor will scrawl his signature on her death certificate creeps nearer with each passing day. 

I don't want to give away too much of what exactly went down in the first half of the story and how that part will be concluded, but it's easily the best portion of the book. It's a very disquieting account of a human predator stalking its prey before hungrily pouncing on it and the bleak, desolated setting contributed a lot to the unnerving atmosphere. There's also a fantabulous scene with the ghost that will play an important part in the final resolution of the novel.

The second part of the story deals with the surprising aftermath of what happened at that deserted house, but the resolution isn't nearly as gripping as the set-up, nevertheless, it's not entirely without interest, either. Edmund engages in a clever cat-and-mouse game with the local authorities and Arthur Crook tramples around in the background as an all-knowing deity, in the earthly guise of a tawdry, scarlet beetle, who reminded me, at times, of Sir Henry Merrivale. I wonder if Arthur Crook was a conscious homage to the Old Man seeing as Lucy Malleson was deeply in love with John Dickson Carr.

But this portion of the book also suffered from a few notable problems. Somewhere around page 150, when the story had run its course, a new element is introduced to the plot by simply contrasting two opposing solutions – which is a nifty and crafty plot device to rejuvenate a plot except when the reader is already aware of the entire truth. Therefore it did nothing for the story. It was also a bit of a let down to see how easily Crook let a careful, meticulous and cunning killer like Edmund Durward slip up in less than ten pages. Especially when the eerie pond, enclosed by mourning trees whose branches drip with the suggestion of ghosts, was simply imploring to be used as a backdrop for a dramatic dénouement. Oh well...

Despite the ending, which left me a little bit under whelmed, this is an outstanding novel of suspense, "calculated to intrigue you, to stir your nerves, to offer you a precarious situation," while also throwing one or two surprises at you along the way. Yes, the story lacked the extra two or three paces required to reach a first place position and qualify as a five-star masterpiece, but four, well-deserved silver stars is nothing to be ashamed of!

Something Nasty in the Woodshed is a very rewarding crime novel and an excellent introduction to Anthony Gilbert. I recommend it without reservations and expect more of her books to show up on this blog in the weeks ahead of us.