Forgotten Book - Death Knocks Three Times

Lucy Malleson was an interesting and capable writer who enjoyed a good deal of success without ever, really "breaking through" into the literary big-time. After her death in 1973, her work quickly faded from view, but she'd had a long career, writing under a variety of pen-names: J. Kilmeny Keith, Anthony Gilbert, and Anne Meredith. The Gilbert name became the best-known, but last year I was delighted to write an introduction for her first Anne Meredith novel, Portrait of a Murderer, when it became the Christmas title for the British Library's Crime Classics series. The book did well- so well, in fact, that although the main focus was on the paperback edition, I gather that the hardback edition swiftly sold more copies than the original first edition! Who would have expected that?

I've read a few of the Anthony Gilbert titles over the years, and I've had mixed feelings about them. She was a capable writer, and she had the important strength of caring about her work which meant that she was not content to stick rigidly to a single storytelling formula. Her main protagonist, Arthur Crook, is a rascally solicitor, so you might think he has a particular appeal for me, but in truth I'm not much of a Crook fan. Sometimes he seems to get in the way of the story, and to me, it's no surprise that a good film made of one of her books, My Name is Julia Ross cut him out of the storyline altogether. So did the remake, Dead of Winter.

All of which brings me to Death Knocks Three Times, a novel she published in 1949. The date is significant, because a key element of the story is the period setting: we really get a feel of life in post-war austerity Britain, although some of the political comments seem a bit delphic to a modern reader. The story begins, like others such as The Nine Tailors, with the detective hero - if one can call Crook a hero - stuck in the middle of a car journey due to bad weather, and taking refuge somewhere just before a mysterious sudden death occurs.

It's not quite clear whether murder has taken place (though the reader will suspect it has...) and the action then shifts to a sequence of poison pen letters, sent to a rather unpleasant elderly lady, who summons help from another woman, who is very nicely characterised and whose name is Frances Pettigrew (was Gilbert referencing Cyril Hare's Francis Pettigrew? Given the number of literary and specifically crime fiction allusions in the book, it is possible). Anyway, as the book title suggests, two more deaths fall to be considered, but an unusual air of mystery pervades the story. It's far from clear what is really going on until Crook comes up with an explanation - which, to be honest, I didn't find wholly satisfying, especially in relation to the first death. 

This is a novel that has earned rave reviews from good judges such as John Norris. For my part, I admired Gilbert's ambition, and her attempt to do something different and unusual, but I felt that the narrative was too diffuse to be altogether successful, and Crook's muted role also felt rather unsatisfactory. An interesting book, though, and despite my reservations I'm glad I read it.

Forgotten Book - Portrait of a Murderer

Anne Meredith is not a name to conjure with in the history of crime fiction, yet this pseudonym does not deserve to have sunk into oblivion. It is one of a number of pen names used by Lucy Malleson, who is far better known as the prolific detective novelist, and creator of Arthur Crook, Anthony Gilbert.

My choice for today's Forgotten Book is the first novel she produced under the Meredith pseudonym, back in 1934. Portrait of a Murderer is, considering its date, arguably a pioneering work. There are some hints of the irony deployed by Francis Iles, but the novel has a bleakness of tone which is distinctive.

The opening section, comprising just one paragraph, is memorable – so much so that I will quote it in full.

"Adrian Gray was born in May 1862 and met his death through violence, at the hands of one of his own children, at Christmas, 1931. The crime was instantaneous and unpremeditated, and the murderer was left staring from the weapon on the table to the dead man in the shadow of the tapestry curtains, not apprehensive, not yet afraid, but incredulous and dumb."

Even though the identity of the culprit is revealed fairly early on, the story that Meredith tells held my interest throughout; at times, her approach almost put me in mind of Ruth Rendell. I don't want to say too much about the plot, as to do so would probably spoil it to some extent. But although I missed the wit that Iles often deployed, I can recommend it. Certainly, I'm very surprised that it has been ignored by historians of the genre.

Forgotten Book - Three-A-Penny

The name of Anthony Gilbert is not often mentioned in the blogosphere, but in her day she (yes! Gilbert was a pseudonym for Lucy Malleson) was a prolific and successful crime writer, most famous for her books featuring Arthur Crook. I read one of them a long time ago, but wasn’t hugely tempted to try another.

However, I’ve just read her memoir, Three-A-Penny, published in 1940 under one of her other pen-names, Anne Meredith, and found it very interesting, not least for her take on her initiation into the Detection Club. She was very different from many of her fellow members – the likes of E.C.Bentley, G.D.H.Cole, Ronald Knox and Dorothy L. Sayers were all Oxford-educated. Gilbert was educated in the good old university of life.

She writes well of her early life, and the financial hardship her family suffered. She left school and became a shorthand typist, but with a burning ambition to write. And before long, she succeeded. Her early crime novels were nothing special, but adopting the Gilbert name transformed her fortunes.

The merit of this memoir is such that it has tempted me to give her work another try. One person she did not mention in the book, perhaps surprisingly, was her cousin. This was Miles Malleson, the actor, still remembered as the hangman in Kind Hearts and Coronets.