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1920s fiction
1930s fiction
1940s fiction
1950s fiction
A01=Anthony Gilbert
Anne Meredith
Arthur G Crook
Author_Anthony Gilbert
blackmail
British crime writer
British Library Classics
Category=FFC
Classic crime fiction
cosy crime
crime fiction set in England
drugs
Endeavour
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eq_crime
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
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feminist writer
Golden Age Detective Fiction
if you like Agatha Christie
if you like Dorothy L Sayers
if you like Lord Peter Wimsey
if you like Midsomer Murders
if you like Miss Marple
if you like Poirot
Inspector Field
Jessica Fellowes
Lucy Malleson
Mitford Murders
mystery
The Detection Club
The Woman in Red
theatre world
Three-a-Penny
underworld
web of intrigue
Product details
- ISBN 9781471910562
- Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 14 Feb 2015
- Publisher: The Murder Room
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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It began with the theatre - and ended with drugs, blackmail and a decades old crime...
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club
Major John Hillier is found dead in his flat, early one morning, in strange circumstances. Inspector Field traces the dead man's last movements and learns that, after breaking up a dinner party, he visited a remote suburban theatre to see a leading lady he didn't even know by sight.
Field traces the Major's history back some years and finds himself entangled in a net of underworld intrigue in England and further afield. Drugs, blackmail and a crime years old all play their part in an affair that starts to attract wide attention.
Anthony Gilbert was the pen name of Lucy Beatrice Malleson. Born in London, she spent all her life there, and her affection for the city is clear from the strong sense of character and place in evidence in her work. She published 69 crime novels, 51 of which featured her best known character, Arthur Crook, a vulgar London lawyer totally (and deliberately) unlike the aristocratic detectives, such as Lord Peter Wimsey, who dominated the mystery field at the time. She also wrote more than 25 radio plays, which were broadcast in Great Britain and overseas. Her thriller The Woman in Red (1941) was broadcast in the United States by CBS and made into a film in 1945 under the title My Name is Julia Ross. She was an early member of the British Detection Club, which, along with Dorothy L. Sayers, she prevented from disintegrating during World War II. Malleson published her autobiography, Three-a-Penny, in 1940, and wrote numerous short stories, which were published in several anthologies and in such periodicals as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and The Saint. The short story 'You Can't Hang Twice' received a Queens award in 1946. She never married, and evidence of her feminism is elegantly expressed in much of her work.
