Anthony Gilbert

• Born: February 15, 1899
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: December 9, 1973
• Place of death: London, England

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; inverted

Principal Series: Arthur Crook, 1936-1974

Contribution

In the Arthur Crook novels, Anthony Gilbert (Lucy Beatric Malleson) develops a protagonist very different from the fashionable detective favored by her contemporaries. Tough and resourceful but lacking the elegance of Dorothy L. Sayers’s or Ngaio Marsh’s heroes, Crook has the earthy vitality of a Charles Dickens character, and he remains essentially himself, despite whatever complicated action swirls around him. The Crook novels move rapidly and present a vivid and recognizable picture of everyday London life. The characters, especially the minor ones, are sketched with quick, sure strokes, and they arouse the reader’s sympathetic interest. Gilbert’s plots are ingenious and complex; she avoids involvement with legal intricacies but presents clues fairly. Although the volume of her production makes uneven workmanship inevitable, the best of the Arthur Crook novels are entertaining, carefully crafted, and satisfying in their mixture of action and humor.

Biography

Anthony Gilbert was one of four pseudonyms adopted by Lucy Beatrice Malleson, born in Upper Norwood, a suburb of London, on February 15, 1899. Her father was a stockbroker, and she was educated at St. Paul’s Girls’ School in Hammersmith. During World War I, Malleson’s father lost his position, and although her mother urged her to train as a teacher, Malleson learned typing and shorthand so that she could earn an immediate income for the family. From the age of seventeen onward, she wrote verse and short pieces for Punch and various literary weeklies. During her early years as a secretary, she began to produce novels. In 1922, after attending a performance of John Willard’s theatrical hit The Cat and the Canary, she tried her hand at detective fiction but had no success until her first Anthony Gilbert book, The Tragedy at Freyne (1927), was published.

During her long career, Malleson wrote approximately seventy detective novels under the pen name of Anthony Gilbert; those books after 1936 center on the unconventional lawyer-detective Arthur Crook. In 1934, however, Malleson began, under the pseudonym Anne Meredith, a series of inverted detective stories, in which the identity of the murderer is known from the outset. In 1940, she published her only nonfictional work, an autobiography entitled Three-a-Penny, under the Meredith name. She valued her privacy and for many years successfully concealed her identity as the writer of the Gilbert novels. She continued to write radio plays for the British Broadcasting Corporation and published two nondetective books under the additional pseudonyms of Lucy Egerton and J. Kilmeny Keith.

During World War II, Malleson employed her secretarial skills in posts with the Red Cross, the Ministry of Food, and the Coal Association. She never married, and she listed her recreations as reading, theatergoing, and travel. Until the end of her life, she remained a resident of London, extending her familiarity with those small details of metropolitan life that contribute to the liveliness and immediacy of her novels. She died in London on December 9, 1973.

Analysis

Lucy Beatrice Malleson began her career with a traditional novel that failed to find a publisher, and she was equally unsuccessful with her first crime novel. Assuming that publishers retained a lingering prejudice against female authors of thrillers, she submitted her next manuscript as Anthony Gilbert. This book, The Tragedy at Freyne, received enthusiastic reviews and was favorably compared to E. C. Bentley’s classic novel Trent’s Last Case (1913, revised 1929).

Encouraged, Gilbert rapidly produced a spate of mystery novels—ten with Scott Egerton, an ambitious young politician, as detective, and two with a French sleuth, M. Dupuy. Although clearly apprentice work, they reveal Gilbert’s talent for rapid action and complex plots. It was not until the appearance of Arthur Crook in Murder by Experts (1936), however, that Gilbert achieved a popular success.

All subsequent books by Anthony Gilbert center on Arthur Crook, a raffish and bibulous Cockney solicitor who is the antithesis of aristocratic intellectuals such as Lord Peter Wimsey and Roderick Alleyn. Most of the novels concern some unworldly individual, often a young woman, who becomes trapped in a tangle of events involving serious crime, usually murder. Crook begins with the proposition “My clients are always innocent,” and he sets about proving his claim by hard work, a well-honed intuition, and an airy disregard for legal protocol. Optimistic and energetic, he functions more as honorary uncle and rescuer than as counsel for the defense.

In his view of crime, Crook is largely pragmatic, and he is not given to speculation on the psychology of wrongdoers. He supports the theory of the “invisible witness,” that unobserved, ordinary person who has happened to notice a vital clue. He uses this insight to trace the actual murderer, believing that an innocent victim requires not merely acquittal but complete vindication as well. Pleased to be known as “The Criminals’ Hope and the Judges’ Despair,” he never accepts as a client anyone he knows to be guilty as charged.

Crook’s methods are as practical as his philosophy. Often, he acts as his own sleuth, but on occasion he employs assistants, both amateur and professional; chiefly he depends on his subordinate, Bill Parsons, a former prisoner. His rough-and-ready methods inevitably lead his more conventional colleagues to consider him a disgrace to the profession.

Whatever his fellow lawyers may think of him, Crook shows exemplary devotion to his calling. A bachelor, he appears to have no living relatives and few interests outside his work. He does not write poetry, play cricket, or collect rare prints. His principal recreation is imbibing beer; much of his basic research involves listening and observing in some shabby London pub. His only other enthusiasm seems to be motoring; he drives a venerable but well-maintained Rolls Royce. Always dressed in a shiny brown suit of conspicuous inelegance, he addresses most women as “Sugar.” His speech is a mixture of Cockney slang and odd quotations from the Bible and the works of William Shakespeare, Robert Browning, and other familiar poets.

No Dust in the Attic

The widely reprinted No Dust in the Attic (1962) shows Gilbert at the top of her form. The heroine, Janice Grey, is appealing and resourceful. After a hasty marriage to charming Patrick Wylie, she discovers that he is a minor member of a gang of jewel thieves. In attempting to run away from him, she attracts the attention of the gang, which pursues her through several seedy London suburbs. Despite her best efforts, chance favors her adversaries, and Crook’s special talents are required to save her and disprove a murder charge against her faithful suitor, Frank James, who has tried to follow her trail.

No Dust in the Attic effectively displays Gilbert’s skill with minor characters. The reader meets a wide range of London types: a crusty pensioner who is nearly run down in a crosswalk; Miss Dina Plantagenet, a minor actress with expensive tastes and generous admirers; Edgar Barrett, a henpecked civil servant who finds Patrick Wylie’s wallet; Mr. Proudie, the fussy and suspicious owner of an antique shop; and various denizens of disreputable London bars.

Gilbert’s fast-paced and dovetailed plot structure are shown to advantage here. The analytical reader will notice that clues are fairly presented and the action is worked out according to a careful timetable. Crook’s deductions, though as usual aided by luck, derive from his observation of minor detail. Although he is, somewhat atypically, cooperating with the metropolitan police in the search for Janice, he plays a lone hand in his attempts to clear her suitor, who has been accused of murdering Miss Plantagenet, the owner of the car used to abduct Janice. After his reliable intuition tells him that Frank is innocent, Crook starts digging into the background of the deceased woman to find out who inherits her automobile. By a series of logical steps, he uncovers a vital clue that reveals the identity of the mastermind behind the gang.

Although Crook is not in the tradition of detective as superhuman intellect, he is shrewd and aware of the implications of trivial events. Near the end of No Dust in the Attic, he receives a phone call from a distraught young woman who says that she is Janice Grey and that she has just escaped from her attic room. Crook immediately asks her for the number on the telephone she is using. Her reply not only leads him to the house where Janice has been imprisoned but also furnishes him with a clue about her captors:

Janice Grey couldn’t have done it, she didn’t know my number, and, bein’ forty miles out of London, it wouldn’t have been in the local directory. And if you think a girl who’s trying to make her getaway is goin’ to stop and dial DIR to get my number.

The style of No Dust in the Attic shows Gilbert’s particular virtues to good advantage. The narrative moves along rapidly, with relatively simple language and sentence structure, but the reader is rewarded with crisp, vivid descriptions and frequent flashes of humor. Early in the book, a censorious single woman witnesses Crook’s first intervention in Janice’s affairs:

A lady emerged coyly from what she always referred to as the smallest room. What she saw horrified her, a creature like an ape in trousers and the reddest head she’d ever beheld, clutching a girl who didn’t seem to be putting up any resistance.

In other passages, Crook is compared to “a red grizzly bear” and “an orangutan.” His own conversation is full of picturesque figures of speech, as when he envisions the embarrassment of Scotland Yard over Janice’s kidnapping: “Not that they ain’t all colours of a mandrill’s behind as it is.” Gilbert’s humor is sometimes sly and self-deprecating; for example, about the missing heroine, Crook reflects,

“She’s like these lady writers,” Crook complained. “So many monikers. Janice Grey, Jane Graham, Mrs. Patrick Wylie—and for all you and me know, she’s calling herself something else by this time.”

No Dust in the Attic concludes, not unexpectedly, with Crook’s roundup of the criminals and a happy ending for Janice and Frank. Always the realist, Crook disclaims any idea of himself as “Justice holding the scales.” Talking with Bill Parsons, he speculates on the fate of the principal villain:

You’ll see, he’ll have an alibi for the night Routh was killed. . . . If you can prove you weren’t even there, even though you were the mind behind the machine—well, a nice crooked lawyer like Penrose could probably swing it.

In the Crook series, Gilbert created a new and immensely popular kind of detective, part music-hall Cockney and part protective father figure. She sustains the narrative with an intricate plot, a brisk, humorous style, and memorable portraits of ordinary people. Always in tune with her readers’ interests, she leaves them with a sharply etched impression of that unlikely knight-errant, Arthur Crook, and a renewed faith in the triumph of a favorite British virtue, fair play.

Principal Series Character:

• Arthur Crook is Cockney in origin and a lawyer by training. Of indeterminate age, Crook remains unchanged throughout the series. He often functions as his own investigator, and his success arises from his quick wits and his encyclopedic knowledge of lower-class London. Rotund, slangy, reassuring, he arouses affection and trust in his clients.

Bibliography

Bakerman, Jane S. “Bowlers, Beer, Bravado, and Brains: Anthony Gilbert’s Arthur Crook.” The Mystery FANcier 2 (July, 1978): 5-13. A profile of Gilbert’s most famous character, cataloging his distinctive traits and analyzing his personal style.

Moore, Lewis D. Cracking the Hard-Boiled Detective: A Critical History from the 1920’s to the Present. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Rare study that treats both the American and the British versions of the hard-boiled detective, providing useful context for the rough-edged Arthur Crook character. Bibliographic references and index.

Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2005. Contains chapters on early mystery and detective fiction and the hard-boiled mode, which help put Gilbert’s novels in perspective.

Wakeman, John, ed. “Anthony Gilbert.” In World Authors, 1950-1970. New York: Wilson, 1975. Gilbert is profiled in this massive list of the writers of the world and their accomplishments.