Fashions may change in rather a startling way, but Crime Club readers eagerly look forward each season to the New Crook, and here comes Anthony Gilbert again with a diabolically ingenious crime story featuring our favourite criminal lawyer. Arthur Crook gets caught in a violent storm on the moors while visiting a police-spy client. He demands shelter at an isolated house and is grudgingly given it for the night by an eccentric old man who lives there alone with one servant. On Crook's return to town he reads that his reluctant host has been found dead in his bath. Accident, murder, or suicide ? Crook is so intrigued that when he hears of the death of two other members of the same family he starts investigations on his own account—even although there is nothing in it for him ; which is strictly against his principles, but is in itself eloquent testimony to the originality of Anthony Gilbert's plot.

Anthony Gilbert, the pen name of Lucy Beatrice Malleson (15 February 1899 – 9 December 1973), was an English crime writer who was a cou sin of actor-screenwriter Miles Malleson.[1][2] She also wrote nongenre fiction as Anne Meredith and published one crime novel and an autobiography (Three-a-Penny, 1940) under the Meredith name.

She published 69 crime novels, 51 of which featured her best-known character, Arthur Crook. Crook is a vulgar London lawyer totally (and deliberately), unlike the aristocratic detectives who dominated the mystery field when Gilbert introduced him such as Lord Peter Wimsey. Instead of dispassionately analyzing a case, he usually enters it after seemingly damning evidence has built up against his client, then conducts a no-holds-barred investigation of doubtful ethics to clear him or her. As fellow mystery author Michael Gilbert noted, "...he behaved in a way which befitted his name and would not have been approved by the Law Society."[3] The first Crook novel was published in 1936 and was immediately popular. The last Crook novel was published in 1974.

Her novel The Vanishing Corpse (1941) was adapted as the film They Met in the Dark (1943), and her novel The Woman in Red (not featuring Crook, 1941) was adapted as the film My Name Is Julia Ross. "You'll Be the Death of Me," an October 1963 episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, was adapted from Gilbert's short story "The Goldfish Button" in the February 1958 Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Her short stories "Door to a Different World" and "Fifty Years After" were Edgar Award nominees.

'Anthony Gilbert is particularly good at keeping the reader in uncertainty all the way. He really is an exceptionally competent detective story writer.'

- Marghanita Laski

The World of Books, B.B.C