A crime that isn't reported; a mother who's threatened...
Classic crime from one of the greats of the Detection Club
Out walking in the snow with her young son, Mike, Sara Drew is the only witness to a particularly unpleasant car accident in which an elderly lady and her dog are killed. Nervous of going to the scene of the accident with a child, she reluctantly goes home. There she meets one of the drivers, and is appalled that he has no intention of reporting the incident. And he also threatens to hurt her son if she goes to the police.
But when Mike is kidnapped she contacts Detective Arthur Crook, who takes over the case and counters the wiles of desperate criminals . . .
Anthony Gilbert's novels show the unsensational type of detective story at its best - DAILY TELEGRAPH
Ingenious plot leavened with sly humour - EVENING NEWS
Anthony Gilbert shared with other successful crime writers a combination of writing talent and clever plotting skills necessary to make it in detective fiction's Golden Age ... Along with Agatha Christie [he] had a talent to deceive - mysteryfile.com
No author is more skilled at making a good story seem brilliant - SUNDAY EXPRESS
Fast, light, likeable - NEW YORK TIMES
Unquestionably a most intelligent author. Gifts of ingenuity, style and character drawing - SUNDAY TIMES
If there is one author whose books need to be widely available, it is Gilbert - Inkquilletc.blogspot
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.