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- ‘A good detective story at last’ The Sunday Express
‘A most intelligent author. Gifts of ingenuity, style and character drawing’ The Sunday Times
Amateur sleuth Scott Egerton’s fourth case
This 2026 Spitfire Publishers ebook and paperback edition represent the first republication of this classic of the ‘Golden Age of Crime’ in almost a century
When the local landowner, Jasper Hilton, is found dead in the library of his shabby and fog-bound country house, the Angles, his tenants in Queen’s Wrotham spared their tears. A knife had been buried deep in the old man’s back with passion. The hunt for the murderer begins quickly, but where to start? The recipient of a number of poison-pen letters, someone wished Jasper Hilton ill. Sergeant Cavindish and amateur sleuth Scott Egerton find an abundance of possible perpetrators: Jasper’s nephew and estate manager Rolfe, who detested his uncle; Gilbert Cheyne, the local doctor in love with Rolfe’s wife; the crusading Mary Carstairs; and Jasper’s numerous poorly-served tenants…
About the Author
Anthony Gilbert was one of four pseudonyms adopted by Lucy Beatrice Malleson, the English novelist who wrote over seventy detective and crime novels between 1925 and 1972. From the age of seventeen, she wrote verse and short pieces for Punch and various literary weeklies. She also wrote as Anne Meredith, J. Kilmeny Keith and Lucy Egerton, but settled on the Anthony Gilbert pen name for her most popular literary creations, earthy, pugnacious, Cockney lawyer-detective Arthur G. Crook and aristocratic amateur sleuth, Scott Egerton. She was an early member of the prestigious Detection Club, and friends with Agatha Christie, who used her Anne Meredith pseudonym as the name for a character in Cards on the Table. Malleson valued her privacy and for many years successfully concealed her identity as the writer of the Gilbert novels, even publishing her memoir, Three-a-Penny, under a pseudonym. Recently reissued under her real name, Three-a-Penny, was selected as a BBC Radio 4 ‘Book of the Week’. She lived most of her life in London, never married, and died in 1973.
Praise for Anthony Gilbert
‘Arthur Crook is a lawyer-sleuth worth meeting’
New York Times
‘His stories, like his detective, Mr Crook, have vitality with decent and credible characters and, detection-wise, fair play’
Times Literary Supplement
‘Careful in craftsmanship, scrupulously fair, more than well-written, Anthony Gilbert’s novels show the unsensational type of detective story at its best’
The Daily Telegraph
‘Anthony Gilbert is a master not only of the craft of the crime story, but also of the creation of character and atmosphere’
Irish Independent
‘Mr Gilbert writes extremely well’
E.C. Bentley
‘Anthony Gilbert has real descriptive power’
E.R. Punshon
Genre: Mystery
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