Sequel to Murder: The Cases of Arthur Crook and Other Mysteries

by Anthony Gilbert

  Sequel to Murder

  Copyright © 2017 by The Literary Estate of Lucy Malleson

  Cover Design by Gail Cross

  ISBN (clothbound edition): 978-1-936363-23-0

  ISBN (trade softcover edition): 978-1-936363-24-7

  FIRST EDITION

  Printed in the United States of America on recycled acid-free paper

  Crippen & Landru Publishers

  PO Box 532057

  Cincinnati, OH 45253

  e-mail: crippenlandru@earthlink.net

  web: www.crippenlandru.com

  Contents

  Introduction

  You Can’t Hang Twice

  Once IS Once Too Many

  A Nice Little Mare Called Murder

  Give Me A Ring

  The Black Hat

  The Reading Of The Will

  Curtains for Me

  Point of No Return

  Cul-De-Sac

  Following Feet

  Three Living ... And One Dead

  The Man With The Chestnut Beard

  Over My Dead Body

  The Funeral of Dendy Watt

  Horseshoes for Luck

  He Found Out Too Late Just How Good an Artist Mabel Was

  A Day of Encounters

  Sequel to Murder

  Sources

  Crippen & Landru Lost Classics

  Other Recent Publications

  Subscriptions

  Introduction

  Lucy Beatrice Malleson (1899-1973) wrote sixty-five detective novels and some sixty known short stories under the pseudonym Anthony Gilbert. When Michael Gilbert wrote a tribute to Lucy Malleson in The Times shortly after her death in December 1973, he revealed that the well-loved crime writer was a very private person who shunned the limelight. She did not want to appear to trade on the fame of her uncle, the actor Miles Malleson, so adopted the Anthony Gilbert name for most of her detective novels. She also wrote as J. Kilmeny Keith and Anne Meredith.

  Miss Malleson was born on Ash Wednesday in 1899. Her early home life was very comfortable as her parents employed several servants including a nanny, cook, housemaid and parlour maid. However, when her father, a stockbroker, lost his occupation it caused financial problems. She had a brother, Christopher, who was eight years her senior and a younger sister, Joan. She first lived in Upper Norwood, London and later the family moved to the West Kensington area and then to Ealing.

  As Anne Meredith, she wrote an autobiography, Three-a-Penny (Faber 1940), in which she states that she was fourteen years old when she decided to be a writer and, although very shy, she was ambitious. At sixteen, she went to a private school to learn secretarial work. She continued with this type of employment for many years, working variously for the Red Cross, the Government’s Jam Department and Coal Association as well as the House of Commons for the Conservative Party and the University of London.

  In Three-a-Penny, she explains the origin of the pseudonym Anthony Gilbert. Gerald du Maurier was her idol of the theatre and she had seen him in The Dancers playing the part of Tony, but her name had to be “Anthony, since Tony was reminiscent of Kiwi, the toney boot polish.” Gilbert she just liked. She first identified herself as Anthony Gilbert at a Crime Club luncheon organised by Foyles.

  J. Kilmeny Keith was used for her first two books. The name Kilmeny is a nice play on words for “kill many”. Malleson certainly killed off many of her characters during her writing career! The Sword of Harlequin (1927) is less a detective novel than a psychological study. In Kilmeny’s other novel, The Man Who Was London (1925), Sir John Ryman is found dead in his library at Streathfield Manor, stabbed in the heart with an African sacrificial knife thus instigating a murder mystery. She wrote this book in six weeks and Collins paid her an advance of forty pounds as she was an unknown writer.

  Twenty-two novels were written as by Anne Meredith but only two contain elements of crime (but little detection). The publisher, Victor Gollancz, proudly mentions on the front cover of the typical yellow dust wrapper for Portrait of a Murderer (1933), “A fine specimen of the inverted detective story, of which the most famous example is perhaps Malice Aforethought.” This splendid book by Francis Iles was also published by Gollancz.

  Anthony Gilbert was a reliable and very popular writer throughout the Golden Age and into the early 1970s. She is noted for vigorous characterisation, much humour and adroit plotting. She is fond of writing about old ladies, especially maiden ladies. On the dedication page of Snake in theGrass (U.K. 1954) a.k.a. Death Won’t Wait (U.S. 1954), the author acknowledges her admiration for the Indomitable Spinster, perhaps because she herself never married. All but two of the Anthony Gilbert novels were first published by Collins in the U.K. Many of her books have alternative titles in the U.S.

  Anthony Gilbert also contributed two chapters to the collaborative short novel No Flowers By Request written by five members of the Detection Club. This first appeared as a newspaper serial in The Daily Sketch in 1953 and in book form in the U.K. (1984) and the U.S. (1987). She was an early member of the Detection Club having joined in 1933 and became its general secretary and later the treasurer in 1940. She was a very active member helping to ensure the Club’s survival during the Second World War. Anthony Gilbert was also a member of the Crime Writers’ Association.

  The first of Anthony Gilbert’s series characters is Scott Egerton, a Liberal Member of Parliament, fair-haired, good-looking, flawlessly dressed and painfully precise. He appears in ten novels. In Egerton’s second case, The Murder of Mrs Davenport (1928), Sir Denis Brinsley is confronted on the eve of his marriage by the beautiful Mrs Helen Davenport. Using his indiscreet letters to her, written fourteen years earlier, she tries to blackmail him. She is later discovered “straggled on the sofa”, strangled. Egerton now has a murder mystery to solve.

  Gilbert wrote three novels featuring a French detective, M. Dupuy of the Sûreté, a dapper, bow-legged little man bursting with vitality. In The Man Who Was Too Clever (1935), Helen Paget is found dead in a private room of the Apsley Hotel in London. Suspicion immediately falls on her husband, Denis, and it is left to M. Dupuy and Scott Egerton to find the murderer. Of Dupuy’s earlier case, The Man In Button Boots (U.K. 1934, U.S. 1935),

  Dorothy L. Sayers wrote, “The reader will have plenty of puzzles on which to exercise his brains”.

  The author’s most famous detective was the suitably named, Arthur Crook, known as both “The Criminal’s Hope” and “The Bane of Bow Street”. Crook himself insists that he is “just a yellow dog of a lawyer who’s known more crooked folk than straight in his time.” Crook is a cigar smoking bachelor who lives in a flat in London, at 2 Brandon Street near Earl’s Court Underground Station. He has occupied this address for over twenty years and right through the Second World War. His untidy office is at the top of a rundown building at 123 Bloomsburv Street, London W.C.1.

  Arthur Crook became a more likeable character as time went on. This big, red-haired, slow speaking, beer swilling, pot-bellied, middle-aged lawyer, with a great, circular red face and a crafty eye, figures in fifty-one novels and five stories. He wears snuff-coloured clothes, suffers from gout and, when sat behind his desk, he has been described as resembling “a giant ginger spider”. He looks like a bookie’s tout and “could easily have qualified for one of the ten worst dressed men in England”. He often drops his aitches when speaking and “sometimes surprised people by proving that even he could read”. He is outrageously cheeky rather than vulgar and rushes in where angels fear to tread, going to unprofessional lengths to clear his clients. One of his business cards r
eads “Linen discretely washed in private. Danger no object.” Crook loves his cars. His indomitable red Scourge, looking as if it had been manufactured from old tin cans, met its end “as a lump of metal” during a car chase at the climax of A Question of Murder (U.S. 1955) a.k.a. Is She Dead Too? (U.K. 1956). The Scourge was then replaced by The Old Superb, an ancient bright yellow Rolls Royce.

  Crook was introduced to the world in 1936 in the novel Murder By Experts. He assists the book’s narrator, Simon Curteis, in finding the killer who stabbed Sampson Rubenstein, a wealthy collector of Chinese art. This educated cockney lawyer was certainly a contrast to the more usual upper class amateur sleuths in print at this time. He uses an unofficial inquiry agent, Bill Parsons, in many of his cases. Parsons is an ex-professional crook whose criminal career was cut short when he was shot in the heel by an official bullet that gave him a permanent limp.

  Arthur Crook was involved in a variety of exciting cases, often making a late entrance on the scene. In Death Knocks Three Times (U.K. 1949, U.S.

  1950), Gilbert gives us an example of a locked room situation. Crook has to solve the problem of death by blunt instrument in a locked bathroom. Quite a surprising solution!

  Crook is very partial to any case involving young women. During No Dust in the Attic (U.K. 1962, U.S. 1963), he meets Janice Gray in a London railway station. He learns that she is in constant fear of her felonious husband and his cronies as she knows too much about their crimes. Two murders then occur and Crook rides to the rescue in The Old Superb. Similarly, he comes to the aid of Ruth Appleyard in And Death Came Too (1956) when she becomes involved in three deaths. In Murder is a Waiting Game (1972), Margaret Cooper is cleared of murdering her husband. Ten years later, a blackmailer threatens to produce new evidence but Crook comes to Margaret’s assistance. Crook is on holiday in the French Alps in Passenger To Nowhere (U.K. 1965, U.S. 1966) and is asked to search for the young Sarah Hollis who has disappeared from a rented villa. Is she linked to a recent murder? This story is a rare example of Crook investigating outside the U.K.

  Lady Killer (1951) concerns the career of Henry Grant, a serial wife murderer who arouses Crook’s suspicion. The Bell of Death (1939) is the sixth investigation for Crook and Bill Parsons. The vicar of St Ethelburga’s discovers a body in the belfry, then William Ferris, who works at the church, disappears and his wife calls in Arthur Crook to find him. When Edmund Durward takes the tenancy of The Haven, he remarks, “I’m going to find that woodshed useful”. Later on in Something Nasty in the Woodshed (U.K. 1942 a.k.a. Mystery in the Woodshed U.S. 1942), when Arthur Crook sees Durward’s advertisement “to meet a Gentlewoman of Independent means” he asks Bill Parsons to file it as “There may be a job of work for us within the year”. Sure enough there is!

  Only two novels, The Case Against Andrew Fane (1931) and Death in Fancy Dress (1933), written under the Anthony Gilbert pseudonym, were nonseries.

  In some of the novels, Detective Inspector Field of Scotland Yard is assisted on different occasions by Scott Egerton, M. Dupuy and Arthur Crook. In The Body on the Beam (1932), Florence Penny, a single lady, is found hanging from a beam in her lodging house bedroom and Scott Egerton aids Field in solving an ingenious mystery.

  In seven short stories, Inspector Field recounts some of the cases in which he was involved whilst a sergeant in K Division, “a well-to-do part of London”. Field is “always sorry for a man that doesn’t drink.” His reminiscing occurs in the bars of pubs such as The Coach and Horses and Horn of Plenty.

  “There was something about the atmosphere perhaps, that stimulated him”. The cases often involved stolen jewels, for example, the Castle Emeralds and the Burlington Ruby.

  Gilbert’s uncollected stories include two series featuring the thirty-nine-year-old journalist Sebastian Sanjoy. He is introduced in the story “The Adventure at the Cat in the Kitchen” which appeared in The Sketch (March 16, 1927). Sanjoy is walking down Fleet Street “six feet three inches, his huge figure with its curling golden hair and curling golden beard, and eyes as blue as his Viking ancestors.” He was billed by The Sketch as “a seeker after romance”. There is something of Robin Hood about him and something too of Raffles since he is more concerned with jewels than corpses. Sadly, the twelve stories are disappointing, insubstantial and unconvincing.

  Anthony Gilbert wrote over twenty plays for the radio; the majority of which were broadcast during the 1940s. Only two of the plays feature Arthur Crook; “Death at 6:30” (1940) and “I Love My Love With An A” (l957).

  Her play My Guess Would Be Murder was shown on television in the Armchair Theatre series in 1959 whilst her novel Riddle of a Lady, which featured Arthur Crook, appeared on the television in 1958. Her story “You’ll Be The Death of Me” was an episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour screened in 1963.

  Three of Gilbert’s novels were adapted for the cinema but given different titles; The Vanishing Corpse became They Met In The Dark (1943) and starred James Mason. The Mouse That Wouldn’t Play Ball became Candles at Nine (1944) while The Woman In Red was released as My Name Is Julia Ross ( 1945).

  Anthony Gilbert’s early short stories were published in the 1920’s in various magazines such as The Sketch, Eve and Graphic. A short series of Inspector Field stories appeared in The Daily Express newspaper in 1935. From that time until the 1970s, the majority of her stories were published in the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and the London Evening Standard newspaper. In fact, she won second prize in the Ellery Queen Awards 1946 for her Arthur Crook story “You Can’t Hang Twice.” She herself considered “Sequel To Murder”, published in 1956, to be her best short story. In her later years, she wrote several stories featuring elderly ladies. Some, like “Point of No Return” (1968), read well whilst others such as “The Intruders” (1967) and “Tiger on the Premises” (1969) are rather predictable.

  Sequel To Murder: Cases of Arthur Crook and Other Mysteries is the first collection of Anthony Gilbert short stories to be published. It contains stories that appeared in all the decades from the 1920s to the 1970s including the five stories that feature Arthur Crook. The majority of the stories concern murders which include stabbing, shooting, strangulation, drowning, bludgeoning and poisoning. 1 hope you enjoy reading them!

  John Cooper Westcliff-on-Sea

  August 9, 2016

  You Can’t Hang Twice

  The mist that had been creeping up from the river during the early afternoon had thickened into a grey blanket of fog by twilight, and by the time Big Ben was striking nine and people all over England were turning on their radio sets for the news, it was so dense that Arthur Crook, opening the window of his office at 123 Bloomsbury Street and peering out, felt that he was poised over chaos. Not a light, not an outline, was visible; below him, the darkness was like a pit. Only his sharp ears caught, faint and far away, the uncertain footfall of a benighted pedestrian and the muffled hooting of a motorist ill-advised enough to be caught abroad by the weather. “An ugly night,” reflected Arthur Crook, staring out over the invisible city. “As bad a night as I remember.” He shut the window down. “Still,” he added, turning back to the desk where he had been working for the past twelve hours, “it all makes for employment. Fogs mean work for the doctor, for the ambulance driver, for the police and the mortician, for the daring thief and the born wrong ’un.”

  Yes, and work, too, for men like Arthur Crook, who catered specially for the lawless and the reckless and who was known in two continents as the Criminals’ Hope and the Judges’ Despair.

  And even as these thoughts passed through his mind, the driver was waiting, unaware of what the night was to hold, the victim crept out under cover of darkness from the rabbit-hutch-cum-bath that he called his flat, and his enemy watched unseen but close at hand.

  In his office, Mr. Crook’s telephone began to ring.

  The voice at the other end of the line seemed a long way off, as though that also were muffled by the fog, but Crook, whose knowledge of men was wide and who
knew them in all moods, realized that the fellow was ridden by fear.

  “Honest, he shuddered so he nearly shook me off the line,” he told Bill Parsons next day. “It’s a wonder a chap like that hasn’t died of swallowing his own teeth.”

  “Mr. Crook,” whispered the voice and he heard the pennies fall as the speaker pressed Button A. “I was afraid it would be too late to find you... .”

  “When I join the forty-hour-a-week campaign I’ll let the world know,” said Crook affably. “I’m one of those chaps you read about. Time doesn’t mean a thing to me. And in a fog like this it might just as well be nine o’clock in the morning as nine o’clock at night.”

  “It’s the fog that makes it possible for me to call you at all,” said the voice mysteriously. “You see, in the dark, one hopes he isn’t watching.”

  Hell, thought Crook disappointedly. Just another case of persecution mania, but he said patiently enough, “What is it? Someone on your tail?”

  His correspondent seemed sensitive to his change of mood. “You think I’m imagining it? I wish to Heaven I were. But it’s not just that I’m convinced I’m being followed. Already he’s warned me three times. The last time was to-night.”

  “How does he warn you?”

  “He rings up my flat and each time he says the same thing. ‘Is that you, Smyth? Remember—silence is golden’; and then he rings off again.”

  “On my Sam,” exclaimed Crook, “I’ve heard of better gags at a kids’ party. Who is your joking friend?”

  “I don’t know his name,” said the voice, and now it sounded further away than ever, “but—he’s the man who strangled Isobel Baldry.”

  Everyone knows about quick-change artists, how they come on to the stage in a cutaway coat and polished boots, bow, go off and before you can draw your breath they’re back in tinsel tights and tinfoil halo. You can’t think how it can be done in the time, but no quick-change artist was quicker than Mr. Crook when he heard that. He became a totally different person in the space of a second.