Biography

Anthony Gilbert was the pen name of Lucy Beatrice Malleson (15 February 1899 – 9 December 1973), an English crime writer and a cousin of actor-screenwriter Miles Malleson. She also wrote fiction and a 1940 autobiography, Three-a-Penny, as Anne Meredith. Lucy Malleson was born in London. When her stockbroker father lost his job the family suffered financial hardship, and she took up shorthand typing to earn a living. She began writing poetry, and then, inspired by the play The Cat and the Canary by John Willard (1922), she tried her hand at detective novels, using the name J Kilmeny Keith. The first was The Man Who Was London, published in 1925. She published over sixty crime novels as Anthony Gilbert, most of which featured her best-known character, Arthur Crook. Crook is a vulgar London lawyer totally (and deliberately) unlike the sophisticated detectives, such as Lord Peter Wimsey and Philo Vance, who dominated the mystery field when Gilbert introduced him. Instead of dispassionately analysing a case, he usually enters it after seemingly damning evidence has built up against his client, then conducts a no-holds-barred investigation of doubtful ethics to clear him or her. As fellow mystery author Michael Gilbert noted, "...he behaved in a way which befitted his name and would not have been approved by the Law Society." The first Crook novel, Murder by Experts, was published in 1936 and was immediately popular. The last Crook novel, A Nice Little Killing, was published in 1974.