After a brief hiatus, Patti Abbot's weekly Forgotten Books feature is back. Check out the latest on her blog and the archives here.
IRTM's contribution this week is The Black Stage by Anthony Gilbert. On a paperback copy of the book dating from 1955, there was this bit of biographical info regarding Gilbert: "Little is known about the author except that his books are among the most popular stories written today." In fact, the identify of the author remained a secret for several more years until it was finally revealed that Anthony Gilbert was the creation of Lucy Beatrice Malleson who had already been writing straight Victorian fiction under the pseudonym of Anne Meredith. Ordinarily, I would tend to suspect that Malleson was simply trying to be successful in a traditional masculine field, except that even before she was unmasked, she had a tendency to wear collars and ties.
Malleson was born in London in 1899 and managed to bypass her mother's designs for her daughter to become a schoolteacher, publishing her first book (with the pen name J. Kilmeny Keith) by the age of 26. It was upon seeing a comedy-thriller play by John Willard that she decided to try crime fiction, choosing the name Anthony Gilbert. Her first successes in the genre and with that name came in 1927 with The Tragedy at Freyne which led to ten total novels featuring Scott Egerton, a young British political leader who solved crimes on the side. In 1936 she started a new series with Arthur G. Crook as a protagonist and dropped Egerton. Crook would go on to star in 51 of her some 69 total crime fiction novels (which doesn't take into account her non-genre works; she was nothing, if not prolific).Her character Arthur G. Crook was, indeed, a character. In an era defined more by Lord Peter Wimsey, Inspector Alleyn, and Albert Campion, Crook is an early prototype of Colombo, a middle-aged beer-drinking Cockney barrister wearing off-the-rack suits with a messy office in a shady part of town. He usually enterss into a case after a client has practically already been convicted, then conducts an investigation that ultimately lays a trap for the real culprit. His techniques are at turns brilliant, at turns unorthodox and borderline unethical, and he's not in the slightest afraid to come across as rude.
The Black Stage takes its title from Shakespeare's framing of night as the time of crimes, and surrounds the Vereker family who returns from the second world war to the family home only to find the weak-willed widow owner in the clutches of a younger man, Lewis Bishop, with designs on her diamonds. Thus the stage is set for every member of the household to become a suspect in the unsurprising eventual demise of Bishop. Crook himself doesn't appear until half-way through, when he's hired to defend Anne Verker, the young woman who was found standing over the body with a gun in her hand. There is no courtroom theater here, but a variation of the re-enactment theme with Crook announces he'll stage the murder scene twice, once to show how his client couldn't have done it and another to show how the murder really occurred.
Malleson/Gilbert is known for skillful plotting, which is light on violence, and an engaging supporting cast, characteristics present not only in her novels but in several short stories which appeared in anthologies and Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. The omniscent POV can get a bit dizzying to contemporary sensibilities and some of the writing is definitely of its time. Still, it's interesting to read the author's words from 1945 which are a bit prescient in light of the big-brotheresque atmosphere in the UK today and comments by certain U.S. military and political figures following the Christmas Day underwear bomber:
And if he put 'em in his pocket, quite apart from ruinin' 'em, there was the chance the police 'ud ask you to turn your pockets out, and just think what an ass you'd look with your pockets weighted down by another fellow's fags. Why, in a country like this one, it's almost enough to hang you out of hand. What you want, when you're looking for diamonds,' he added forcibly, 'is a strip to the buff policy, ladies and gents. And then an X-ray to make sure no one's doin' a swallowing act. If you ask me, I think there's a better explanation about the box bein' full than just that Bishop was feelin' generous. I think those cigarettes were put there to hide something else.'
Gilbert's novel 1941 The Woman in Red, about a secretary whose employer drugs her and tries to drive her mad to cover up a murder, was dramatized on CBS radio and made into two films, My Name is Julia Ross (1945) and Dead of Winter (1987) in which Gilbert was not credited. She was also a founding member of the British Detection Club and received a Queens award for her short story "You Can't Hang Twice" (Ellery Queen's Morcade, 1976).
Those Penquin covers always make my heart lift. And I loved Anthony Gilbert once upon a time. Never knew it was she until now though.
Posted by: Patti Abbott | January 08, 2010 at 08:27 AM