The Return of Michael Gilbert

Regular readers of this blog will be well aware of my enthusiasm for the work of Michael Gilbert. He was one of the most successful male British crime writers of the post-war era, and during the course of his long career he showed an ability to master a wide range of different types of storytelling - espionage, adventure, classic detection, courtroom drama, the impossible crime mystery, the short story, the stage play, the tv script. That versatility probably counted against him, to some extent, in terms of fame or total book sales, as it did in respect of his colleague and contemporary Julian Symons. But like Symons', his achievements were remarkable.

So I am absolutely delighted that the latest British Library Crime Classic is Smallbone Deceased, widely regarded as one of the finest crime novels ever to be set within the legal profession. The story benefits from a pleasing plot, an unusual amateur sleuth, and an insider's view of life in a post-war solicitors' firm. What Gilbert would make of the way some legal professionals are so dependent on iffy technology and even iffier flow charts these days is an interesting question, one to which I think I can guess the answer; but I'm sure he'd have viewed some of the absurdities of present day legal life with the same dry humour that informed his portrayal of legal life in the 1950s. 

I'm equally pleased to say that this is not the only Michael Gilbert novel that will be appearing in the series this year. It will be followed by Death in Captivity and Death Has Deep Roots, two more fine stories, both of which were filmed. The splendidly varied settings and styles of the three books, taken together, demonstrate Gilbert's versatility better than any words of mine can do.

That said, I haven't resisted the opportunity to discuss Gilbert's life and work at some length in each of my introductions to the three books. My approach with these introductions, and with intros to the other books in the series, is to minimise repetition and to try to include fresh information wherever possible. In that endeavour, I benefited from valuable input from Gilbert's daughter, the novelist and radio presenter Harriett Gilbert.

Along with Symons (and, in a different way, Christie and Sayers) Gilbert was also a major influence on my own ambitions as a writer during my formative years as a teenager. He it was whose ability to combine a legal career with a career as a novelist enabled my parents to say - look, it can be done, you can get a "proper job" and still be a writer. So he has quite a bit to answer for. When I got to know him slightly in later life, I found him gracious in the extreme. It was a privilege to talk to and correspond with him, and it was a major highlight of my early years as a crime novelist when he supplied a nice endorsement of my novel Eve of Destruction. (Despite the fact that his legal practice in Lincoln's Inn had little in common with Harry Devlin's in Liverpool!) I like to think he'd be thrilled to see these three excellent novels enjoying a new life in the twenty-first century.

The Man Who Could Not Sleep

Michael Gilbert’s versatility continues to astonish me, the more I think about what he achieved as a crime writer whilst also working as a partner in a major law firm. I’m a long-time fan of his writing, and so I was delighted to lay my hand on another posthumous collection edited and introduced by John Cooper and published by Robert Hale.

The Man Who Could Not Sleep and other mysteries is remarkable because it contains not short stories but two lengthy radio plays, plus two synopses for radio plays that Gilbert never managed to bring to fruition. Cooper lists the work that Gilbert did for radio and TV, and it’s a CV that would be impressive even if he’d never written all those fine novels and short stories.

The ‘man who could not sleep’ is, as anyone who has read Gilbert’s splendid Smallbone Deceased will know, the lawyer Henry Bohun. I’ve always felt that Bohun was one of Gilbert’s best characters, and it’s a pity he is not better known, and did not appear more often.

I was intrigued that one of the synopses was for a play about football. It’s not easy to write fiction about sport, though I’ve written a couple of short stories with football themes. My first ever full length novel was about football, too. It was never published, just as Gilbert’s play was never broadcast. In my case, it was just as well!

Anticipating Diana Devon

I’ve never had any dealings with the publishers Robert Hale, but I am full of admiration for the way in which they have achieved the publication of all the previously uncollected short stories by that wonderful writer Michael Gilbert.

The latest book of Gilbert stories has just landed on my doorstep, courtesy of Tangled Web UK, for whom I shall be reviewing the collection. It’s called The Murder of Diana Devon and Other Mysteries, and it’s been edited by John Cooper (co-author of a wonderful book about collecting detective fiction which I’d love to see reissued and brought up to date.)

Cooper says in his introduction that Gilbert ‘was one of the greatest crime writers to emerge after World War II’. He was awarded the CWA’s Cartier Diamond Dagger and both the Mystery Writers of America and the Swedish Academy of Detection honoured him as a Grand Master. He published 30 novels and no fewer than 185 short stories, all of which have now been gathered together in 14 volumes.

Gilbert was a fluent and varied writer, and although Smallbone Deceased is widely regarded as his masterpiece, many of his other novels can still be read with enormous pleasure. I’ve mentioned some of them on this blog over the last couple of years. He was equally adept at the short form, and I’m anticipating The Murder of Diana Devon with a great deal of pleasure.

Michael Gilbert

I’ve mentioned Michael Gilbert a few times in this blog, and one of his titles is my ‘forgotten book’ this coming Friday. He’s a writer whom I came across in my teens. My parents liked his books and encouraged me to read him.

They had an ulterior motive, actually. The biographical note in the Gilbert books that Hodder published in those days explained that Gilbert combined a career as a solicitor with his crime writing. He achieved a good deal of success in both fields (he was Raymond Chandler’s solicitor in England, incidentally and a good friend of the great man). At this time my parents were unnerved by my stated ambition to become a crime writer, and naturally wanted me to have a ‘proper job’. When I proved resistant to this, they pointed to Michael Gilbert as an example of someone who wore both hats.

Duly persuaded, I studied law and ultimately became a solicitor. I remained a firm fan of Michael Gilbert’s books and during the 1980s, I persuaded a legal magazine to allow me to write an article about his work. This gave me the chance to interview a man who was something of a hero. I talked to him at length on the telephone and found him as urbane and likeable as his books. He was, too, remarkably and genuinely modest, a man who had spent most of his career in a world where solicitors were not allowed to advertise and in grave trouble if they did so surreptitiously.

After that, we spoke again on various occasions. He encouraged my own writing and was kind enough to provide an extremely positive quote for Eve of Destruction (something he seldom, if ever, did for other writers, and something of which I am rather proud). In later years he allowed me to reprint some of his classic short stories for CWA anthologies and shared with me his disappointment at the lack of critical attention given to The Queen against Karl Mullen, one of his last books, and quite splendid. The pity was that, by the time the novel came out, Michael Gilbert was no longer truly fashionable. Even Hodder, to whom he had long been faithful, dropped him. He had won much acclaim, including the CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger, but he is associated primarily with the post-war era, in which his most famous whodunit, Smallbone Deceased, is set. Yet he wrote with great accomplishment for half a century.

One other thing about Michael Gilbert. He had a great deal of insight into the crime genre in all its forms. As well as many novels and countless short stories, he wrote with success for both tv and stage, and Death in Captivity , Danger Within, was enjoyably filmed by Don Chaffey. He was a friend and admirer of Cyril Hare, and edited a posthumous collection of Hare’s best short stories. He wrote intelligently about the work of other writers, and thereby introduced me to such notable authors as Henry Wade and Christianna Brand.

Oh, and he and his wife found time to produce seven children, one of whom also became a successful writer. Quite a man.