#1962 Club: No Dust in the Attic by Anthony Gilbert

Arthur Crook, travelling to London, comes across a couple at a Railway restroom and immediately suspects that something is amiss. It certainly is. Janice Grey, had in her young days married Pat Wylie after a chance encounter outside a phone booth (and phones play an important role in the story). However, when she realized that …

Friday’s Forgotten Book: Footsteps Behind Me by Anthony Gilbert (1953)

By https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=31018054941′, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69792289 Edward Lane - once almost awarded the Military Cross, for his valour during the first world war - has fallen so low in the aftermath of the second one, that he now blackmails people and both consumes and peddles drugs. When the novel opens, Ted is thinking of blackmailing four …

Friday’s Forgotten Book: The Mouse who wouldn’t play Ball by Anthony Gilbert (1943)

"One of them did it, of course," he told himself, "but we shall never know which, so what the hell?" A tense figure waits near a staircase, in anticipation. Suddenly there is a cry of fire and panicked figures come running out of the dark, converging near the staircase. A candle is lighted but before …

Friday’s Forgotten Book: Treason in My Breast by Anthony Gilbert (1938)

Have you ever noticed in murder cases how often it's some trivial detail that tips the scale? Some flower-seller or some old woman running out to the post or a dog getting run over at a moment when you couldn't allow for any of those things happening... Janet Scott, wife of a young solicitor, Gerald …

Friday’s Forgotten Book: Passenger to Nowhere by Anthony Gilbert (1965)

"...there are old women living in big houses in all the country districts in France. Sometimes one remembers - they could die and who would know? They have no friends because they desire none - they have met life alone, they meet death alone." Sarah Hollis, nursing a broken heart after her fiancé breaks off …

Forgotten Books: Three Arthur Crook Novels by Anthony Gilbert

"Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow worldLike a colossus, and we petty menWalk under his huge legs, and peep aboutTo find ourselves dishonorable graves...."One thing that I have always found problematic is the grading of writers. He/she is an A list author, we are told, the other is a B-lister. Who, I wonder, makes …

The #1947 Club: Death in the Wrong Room by Anthony Gilbert

Anthony Gilbert is the pseudonym of Lucy Beatrice Malleson (1899-1973), member of the Detection Club and author of some seventy novels, a majority of which feature Arthur Crook, a lawyer from London, whom Gilbert deliberately created, in 1936, as a foil to the aristocratic amateur detectives who dominated the literary crime scene at the time.Death …

Forgotten Books: A Murder Staged: Anthony Gilbert’s The Musical Comedy Crime

I experienced a sense of deja vu while reading Anthony Gilbert's The Musical Comedy Crime. A man is murdered and Inspector Field investigates. He zooms in on one suspect and despite misgivings arrests him. Then Scott Egerton, the Liberal politician- detective of Gilbert's early novels (before the advent of her most masterly creation, Arthur Crook) …

Tuesday Intros and Teaser Tuesdays

Every Tuesday Bibliophile by the Sea hosts First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros, where one shares the first paragraph or (2) of a book one is reading or thinking about reading soon.  Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:• Grab your …

Forgotten Books: The Body on the Beam by Anthony Gilbert

Halfway through Anthony Gilbert's The Body on the Beam, I thought that the law of averages had finally caught up with me. After two brilliant books and one pretty good, it was inevitable that the next one fail to live up to its expectations.Unlike the earlier three, in this book the emphasis is more on …