Friday’s Forgotten Book: The Family Man by Anne Meredith (1942)

God's a good playwright... just when you think the curtain's coming down the plot takes a freash twist, and you find that, in spite of death and disappointment, life still goes on. Anthony Gilbert is one of my favourite authors of all time. However, Anthony Gilbert was not the solo pseudonym of Lucy Beatrice Malleson. …

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 …

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 …

Wolf! Wolf!: Anthony Gilbert’s Lady-Killer

Anthony Gilbert was one of the finds of last year. It is thus appropriate that the first mystery read this year be of hers. Anthony Gilbert was the pseudonym of  Lucy Beatrice Malleson and she was born almost at the fag end of the 19th century, in 1899. Her first published novel was The Man who …