Caroline: The writer I want to talk about today published her first mystery in the 1920s and kept up a blistering at-least-a-novel-a-year pace for five decades, with her final book coming out after her death in the 1970s. She penned multiple detective characters, one of whom was so popular that he appeared in dozens of books. She wrote romantic or sensation fiction under a different penname to her crime fiction, and guarded her identity fiercely. Her work inspired films and stage plays, and she wrote an autobiography that conceals more than it reveals about the inner workings of her literary mind.
This description, as I’m sure you are aware, easily fits the identity of one Agatha Christie. But it also describes somebody else. Somebody who is much less well known, even to avid fans of Christie and her fellow golden age detective novelists. Somebody who deserves to be known better.
She went by several different names, and as you will hear shortly, she enjoyed the secrecy and the mischief involved in maintaining multiple literary identities. But for now, let me introduce her as she was known to the Detection Club and her crime fiction-loving readers in the 1930s. Listeners, meet Anthony Gilbert.
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Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton. If you like the podcast, don’t forget that my new book, A Body Made of Glass, is out in April and available for pre-order now. I especially recommend the audiobook, which is read by me — basically a podcast episode like this one except it last nine hours. Find out more and get extra bonus material in exchange for your pre-order at carolinecrampton.com
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I did say you were going to meet Anthony Gilbert, but Anthony Gilbert didn’t actually become Anthony Gilbert until 1927. The writer who would become known by that name, among others, was born Lucy Beatrice Malleson in 1899 in Upper Norwood, south London. Her father was a stockbroker and she had a fairly middle class upbringing, growing up with a nurse and attending the private St Paul’s School for Girls in Hammersmith. But in 1914, when she was 15, her father lost his job as the Stock Exchange was closed down as soon as war was declared at the end of July. The family was, she would write later in a memoir, “left high and dry”. They had little savings and being just one of thousands with his skillset now put out of work, her father had few job prospects. He cycled long distances around the south of England in search of a job, his travelling a constant source of fear for his wife and children as he was quite deaf, until he eventually got a post as a clerk in a records office. But money was never to be plentiful again in Malleson’s schooldays, and fear of its lack was to shape her path in life profoundly.
Even in her early teens, she was sure she wanted to be a writer, pushing back against the suggestion from her mother and aunts that she would try and win a scholarship to university so as to become a teacher. They thought that writing “will be very nice for your spare time”, but she was absolutely convinced that she could make it her profession, even enrolling in secret in a correspondence course titled “Writing for the Press” and beginning to sell short articles and verses before she even left school. As it happened, she did not win a scholarship despite her best efforts, and so resolved upon secretarial work as the best way to start bringing in money for the family quickly while still being able to pursue her literary ambitions in her spare time. A godmother paid for her to take a six week course in typing and shorthand, and soon she was embarking on a job hunt of her own around the agencies and offices of London.
One of the things that I love about Malleson’s fiction and, in particular, her 1940 memoir Three-A-Penny, is the specificity of the details she includes. During her secretarial training, when money was really tight, she writes about the tricks she picked up for making her cash go further, such as slipping into the books department of the Army and Navy Stores on Victoria Street in London where it was possible to hover in the “theological works” section and read as much as two chapters of a novel without buying it, or how to make a penny bun do as a full meal at lunchtime. She also used to sneak back to the office during the lunch hour to use the secretarial school’s typewriter to type up and send out her poems and stories to magazines. Lots of her characters would go onto inhabit this world of extreme genteel poverty, living always on the edge of managing and worrying about where the next meal or pair of warm shoes will come from. It’s an interesting difference between the world that Malleson set her books in and that of some of the other golden age detective fiction writers, who on the whole didn’t tend to write extensively about holes in stockings and reusing the same tea bag multiple times. As much as I love the comfortable milieu of loyal valets and perfectly boiled eggs inhabited by Lord Peter Wimsey and Hercule Poirot, I do also appreciate the social history that I learn from the details Malleson includes of life lower down the economic pecking order.
She worked as a secretary throughout the first world war, delighting in a situation that made trained, experienced women in demand and able to command good salaries. She had posts at the Red Cross, typing up casualty lists, and in various government offices — including one that she called the “jam department” — before she settled down to a long stint in the Coal Association, minuting meetings and compiling economic reports. She continued to work there long after the end of the war, navigating the flood of returning men desperate for jobs, and even managing to get some writing work out of it — the Association’s press department placed articles in the press under the pseudonym “Claudine” that were supposed to educate the public about economics. By the time she was twenty, she had pulled together an impressive array of cuttings, with her verses published in Punch, the Sunday Times and the Observer bringing in a good side income. But she was not, yet, what she would consider “a writer”, who earned her living from her pen and put out well-reviewed books that bore her name.
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Lucy Malleson’s luck began to turn in the early 1920s. She went to see a popular West End play — Cat and the Canary by John Willard, which was a Gothic thriller full of murder and fun stage effects, with fireplaces turning around and ghostly hands emerging from the walls. The next morning at breakfast, she declared to her sister that she could write something as good as that, and within six weeks she had produced the manuscript of a detective novel that she sent off to a publisher. Again, this isn’t unlike how Agatha Christie came to write her first detective novel, with a challenge set by her sister Madge. Anyway, Collins accepted Malleson’s manuscript, with a few modifications, and in time her first novel appeared in print — a country house thriller titled The Man Who Was London, published under the name of J. Kilmeny Keith. She was disappointed to receive only £40 as an advance from it, and the sales were low. The publisher declined to take a second book from her, declaring the plot “unsound”. After a promising start, it must have felt like her luck was deserting her again.
So she pulled a trick that authors are still using today: for the next book she tried to sell, she made it look like someone else had written it, so that her previous “double failure”, as she called it, could not prejudice agents and publishers against her. She initially chose the name “Michael Scott” under which to submit the book, which came from a favourite poem by Sir Walter Scott, “The Lay of the Last Minstrel”. But some research revealed that there was already an author working under that name, so she modified it to Gilbert Scott. That also went by the wayside when she found that the telephone book already contained three other Gilbert Scotts — a problem for Malleson, who wanted to disguise her identity, not wholesale give away any subsequent literary credit to a stranger. Finally, she settled on Anthony Gilbert as her fake name for the query letter, picking this because her favourite actor Gerald du Maurier had played a character called Tony in a play she liked, The Dancers. She wrote a letter to her agents, purporting to come from this “Anthony Gilbert” who was submitting to them on the recommendation of “a mutual friend”, and scribbled a fake signature. To her surprise, her ruse worked, and the agents happily sent Anthony Gilbert’s book out to Collins, the publisher that had declined to take a second detective novel from Lucy Malleson or J. Kilmeny Keith. Anthony Gilbert must have felt like a talisman, or a rebirth, because just days later “he” had two short stories accepted by the prestigious weekly paper the Sketch, with a fee that equalled six months’ pay at her current secretarial job. Then that news was topped by the revelation that Collins were keen to publish Anthony Gilbert’s first novel, and wanted biographical information about the author for publicity purposes.
This is where I think we get a good insight into Lucy Malleson’s personality. A lot of people at this point would probably have owned up, at least to the publishers and agent, who Anthony Gilbert really was, and let them in on the secret. In the same way, a few years later, that publisher Victor Gollancz knew that “Francis Iles” was a pseudonym of well known crime writer Anthony Berkeley, even while Iles’s identity was presented to the public as a big mystery. Malleson, though, decided to bring Anthony Gilbert to life as much as she could, suggesting an instinct towards theatricality and a liking for intrigue that is also visible in her books. She sent Collins a fictional biography, claiming that Mr Gilbert lived a retired life on the Sussex Downs breeding Scotch terriers and photographing ancient churches. He rarely came to London, and so was not available for interviews, unfortunately. They wanted a photograph, though. Again, Malleson was equal to the task. She hired a wig and a beard, donned them along with a Homburg hat and tortoiseshell glasses, and had a photographer take pictures of her in this get up. The result, she wrote later, was not unlike the description of Professor Bhaer in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Malleson was extremely pleased with the effect, but unfortunately the publisher did not share her enthusiasm, because they had hoped to present Anthony Gilbert as an exciting young literary discovery, not an elderly dodderer who never leaves the country. And so the photograph of “Anthony Gilbert” never appeared on an book cover, but Malleson did proudly display it on the mantelpiece in her study for many years, calmly refusing to answer questions from visitors about who it depicted.
After the break: Arthur Crook and Anne Meredith.
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Anthony Gilbert’s first book, The Tragedy at Freyne, was very well reviewed — the New York Times, the Sunday Times, the Spectator, and many other publications gave it very positive write ups. Hints that the author was some well-known person, such as a cabinet minister or a bishop, hiding behind a pseudonym certainly helped add intrigue to the book’s debut. Some critics did find the book “suspiciously mature” for a first detective novel, but nobody noticed that the style was somewhat similar to a mostly-overlooked book by an nonentity called J. Kilmeny Keith. Lucy Malleson as a name, too, remained entirely unknown.
That is, until she attended a lunch given for the writers of the Collins Crime Club by Foyles, the booksellers on Tottenham Court Road. Each writer in turn was asked to stand up in answer to their name, and when Lucy, a woman in her mid twenties with round cheeks and rimless pincenez, rose from her chair when Anthony Gilbert was called, there was a sensation and roars of laughter. At least one fellow attendee couldn’t believe that Anthony Gilbert was a woman, but Lucy assured them that she was, indeed, the author of The Tragedy at Freyne.
The advent of Anthony Gilbert opened doors for Malleson — she was welcomed into a literary social circle that had previously been closed to her. She was able to give up full time office work, but at the same time, life at home was changing too. She still lived with her parents, and her mother’s health was failing. The three of them moved out to the Essex coast, to Westcliff-on-Sea, where Malleson pushed her mother around in a wheelchair every day for eight months and felt that London was “as remote as the North Pole”. They returned to London to a rented house in Ealing, where both Malleson and Anthony Gilbert really knuckled down to work, producing 14 novels in seven years, as well as dozens of short stories. Her memoirs of this time are full of breezy anecdotes about laying linoleum and cooking fish, but she does also allow herself a rare personal observation, that although she was more financially secure than ever, this was also the loneliest she had ever been. Unmarried, still living with her parents, doing a lot of housework and seemingly with few friends beyond her literary contacts, she felt quite alone — other than for the dog she had acquired with some of her earnings.
It is not surprising, then, that her characters from this time mostly inhabit a vibrant world of house parties and soirees. Gilbert’s debut, The Tragedy at Freyne, explores whether the death of a rich man during his own country house party was murder or suicide, and introduces one of the other guests, the Liberal MP Scott Egerton, as an amateur sleuth. Although the idea of an MP detective is a very interesting one, he does very little detecting within his own political world, perhaps because Malleson’s own experience there was confined to her time as a secretary for the Coal Association. Those wanting a House of Commons mystery will have to be content with The Division Bell Mystery from 1932, which was written by the Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson.
Still, Egerton went on to appear in a string of novels through the late 1920s, investigating cases that featured other country houses and wealthy people in books like Death at Four Corners and An Old Lady Dies and even popping over to Paris in 1929’s The Mystery of the Open Window. That latter book was also Malleson’s first attempt at a classic locked room mystery, demonstrating that she was most definitely engaging with the popular tropes of golden age detective fiction just as the so-called “rules” of such writing were being codified. As well as country houses, she also set books in theatres and, more interestingly, London slums and tenements. After her mother died in 1929, Malleson moved in with her sister in East London for a while and assisted her in the social work she did in Stepney and Poplar, where she got to see first hand the kind of extreme poverty that most middle class authors would never encounter. The experiences she had during these years begin to show up in the Scott Egerton books of the early 1930s, and they are better for it.
But there’s something a little unreal about Scott Egerton, which begins to make him seem more like a minor deity than a real human being. No matter how many cliffs there are to be scrambled up or bogs trampled through in the course of a case, his physical appearance is always perfectly unruffled, he never gets tired, and he is described as possessing the “natural gift” of always turning up “just when the situation became imminent”. He has that irritating trick of knowing the solution to the mystery early on but refusing to share it with other characters, so that the reader feels like they are being kept artificially in the dark until the very end. I don’t know that any of Malleson’s detective fiction can truly be described as “fair play” — careful clueing and puzzle setting was never her forte, and she liked a dash of a mysterious “espionage plot”, as in books like 1930’s The Night in the Fog. The ten Scott Egerton books published by Anthony Gilbert between 1927 and 1925 were well received by critics and readers, though, and were enough to earn Gilbert a coveted invitation to become a member of the Detection Club in 1933, one of three writers to be elected that year, the others being Gladys Mitchell and E.R. Punshon. Malleson’s account of her inauguration ceremony in her memoir is well worth looking up — it’s simultaneously solemn and irreverent, and her surprise in learning that Dorothy L. Sayers was not slender, aloof and willowy as Malleson had imagined, but massive, majestic and businesslike, is very funny. Part of what is so compelling about Malleson, for me, is that she is simultaneously very confident of her abilities and completely unsure of herself. She had wanted to be a writer from an early age, laboured very hard to make it so, believed in her own talent, and then also felt very shy and uncertain in the presence of her peers. Who among us has not felt bashful at a work party where we don’t recognise many people?
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Once a member of the Detection Club, Malleson began to tire of Scott Egerton, perhaps sensing that the dominance of the aristocratic amateur sleuth was beginning to give way in the detective fiction genre in favour of more experimentation. That same year, 1933, saw her publish a very different kind of novel and inaugurate a new pseudonym. Portrait of a Murderer by Anne Meredith is a Christmas mystery, focused on the killing of a wealthy man on Christmas morning by one of his six children, all of whom he is on bad terms with. What makes the book so striking is the structure; this is an inverted mystery, in which we know who the killer is almost from the start and then follow them, in both the first and third person, through the subsequent action. It was an approach already pursued with some success by Anthony Berkeley, under his Francis Iles pseudonym, and by Freeman Wills Crofts, among others. Malleson’s version drew praise both for the characters she created and also for her deft hand with the psychological motives involved — critics including Dorothy L. Sayers were admiring of her work in this book. And it was this book that helped prompt something of a Malleson revival in recent years. The British Library republished it as part of their Crime Classics series in 2017, and it sold so well that they did one of her Anthony Gilbert books, Death in Fancy Dress, in 2019, and that same year her memoir, Three-A-Penny, was reissued by another publisher. Many of her other novels are now accessible in the UK at least in digital editions, and further reprints are planned.
The Anne Meredith pseudonym was to remain in use for the rest of Malleson’s life, initially in the 1930s for further inverted and psychological mysteries, and then later on as the name she used for standalone romantic or historical fiction. But that was a sideline compared with what was about to happen for Anthony Gilbert. 1934 and 1936 also saw her try out another detective, Monsieur Dupuy, a French police sleuth who takes a case in Monte Carlo in 1934’s The Man in Button Boots and then comes to London in 1936 for the death of a French film star in Soho in Courtier to Death.
But also in 1936, Malleson achieved what critic Jeanne B. Elliott has called her first popular success with the novel Murder by Experts, which introduced a new detective, the solicitor Arthur G. Crook. Although you don’t usually find this book on lists of the most cherished golden age detective novels now, it was undoubtedly successful in its time, to the extent that Malleson immediately stopped writing novels featuring her Scott Egerton and Monsieur Dupuy and from then on devoted herself to producing an Arthur Crook book pretty much every year until her death in 1973, with a final one, A Nice Little Killing, appearing posthumously in 1974.
Arthur Crook is not your average golden age detective. He’s rough and ready, grubby, Cockney, and not at all against bending rules and laws to get the job down. He’s the antithesis of polished, aristocratic sleuths like Roderick Alleyn or Peter Wimsey, with their genial sidekicks and their moral qualms. Crook by name and crook by nature, I think Malleson is suggestion. He starts from the point of view that all of his clients are innocent, no matter what they are supposed to have done, and proceeds from there. He rails against amateur criminals and deplores detective fiction, preferring to confine his researches to real life events. He is solitary, with only occasional assistance from Bill Parsons, a former prisoner, and, memorably in 1970s Death Wears a Mask, a down-to-earth middle age woman named May Forbes who he befriends. In general, his is a cynical world of criminals, victims and passersby, but occasionally a heart of gold peeps out from behind his grumpy facade, and he always seems to save the day in good time. Malleson enjoyed emphasising his incongruous appearance in the middle and upper class circles into which his cases compel him. In Death in the Wrong Room from 1947, one character declares that “that fellow’s a lawyer, for all he looks like a bookie’s tout”, and in 1941’s The Vanishing Corpse he is said to have “a big coarse face and a pot belly and short muscular legs”. He is prone to disappearing himself for great long stretches, investigating out of sight in a way that a rule-following golden age detective novelist should never allow. But his unattractive appearance and manners work very much in his favour — your classic arrogant, wealthy murderer is prone to thinking that they can easily elude the likes of Crook, only to discover to their dismay that they cannot.
The Vanishing Corpse is my personal favourite of the Crook novels I have been able to read so far — even with my most devoted efforts over the course of months, I haven’t been able to complete all of the I think 52 that she wrote. I am just partial to vanishing corpses in detective fiction as a trope, but the book also I think includes a rare slice of autobiography from Malleson, who makes her spinster protagonist, Miss Laura Verity, so utterly lonely that the very first line of the novel declares her intention to end her own life. The Woman in Red from 1941 is another one that I like, both for the details about Julia Ross’s struggles to find secretarial work and for the psychological horror of the plot. Later, after the second world war, Malleson began to experiment further, keeping Crook as her investigator but moving further and further away from the references to golden age style she employed in the 1930s. 1951’s Lady Killer weaves together a potential serial killer plot with elements of inverted mystery and courtroom drama and 1959’s Death Takes A Wife gives us what we would today describe as domestic noir.
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With all of this innovation and variety on offer, as well as the sheer number of her books, then, why isn’t Anthony Gilbert a household name in crime fiction in the way that some of her contemporaries are?
I have a few possible answers to this question. The first is the simplest — just sheer luck. I do think there is an element of luck involved in why people were still reading Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers well after those writers’ deaths, but not Anthony Gilbert and E.C.R. Lorac to nearly the same degree. Second, and here is where the Lorac comparison is apt, I think the sheer amount of books that Lucy Malleson published has actually counted against her. All the different names, too: J. Kilmeny Keith, Anthony Gilbert, Anne Meredith, there were even a couple of books later under the name Lucy Egerton.. It’s something of a vicious cycle, really: she never had a huge breakthrough of the level of say The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and thus because her books experienced only moderate sales, in order to keep making her living, she had to put out a lot of them, which meant she needed multiple pen names and therefore had a weaker personal brand as an author, we would say today. She probably came closest with 1936’s Murder by Experts, which introduced the character of Arthur Crook, but its popularity didn’t last — I would wager there aren’t that many of you listening, dedicated fans of the genre that you are, who have already read it.
Lorac, too, had this issue, and published under two different names — Carol Carnac and E.C.R. Lorac — to disguise the fact that she was sort of flooding the market with her whodunnits in order to make enough money in the aggregate. Without that one big hit, Malleson never had the chance to rest on her laurels and write at a more considered pace, and nor did her reputation ever ascend to a level where her work would survive the shift in taste away from what had been popular in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. And then finally, I think it has been more difficult for people to discover that they are fans of Anthony Gilbert even now that more of the books are readily available, because they aren’t consistent or predictable in the way that much of Christie is, for example. As I hope I’ve shown you today, the highs of a good Gilbert novel are really very high, but there are some right duds in amongst them there too, as you might expect from someone who regularly wrote an entire novel in a couple of weeks and and often published three novels in the same year. You can’t rely on the same kind of experience every time you pick up one of her books, and I think that, quite reasonably, puts people off. Over the months that I’ve been preparing for this episode, though, I have come to find the potluck element of her bibliography quite fun. Will this be a dazzlingly good one, or one so silly that I can’t stop reading bits aloud? The only way to find out is to dig in and start turning the pages.
But really what has kept me picking up these books is the mystery of Lucy Malleson herself. In some ways, we have more information about her from her own pen than we do some of her contemporaries, and her irreverent yet awed account of the rarely-described Detection Club induction is something I will always cherish. And yet this version of her feels incomplete. I don’t think you can publish as many novels as she did without taking writing very seriously, yet the tone of her memoir and interviews is light-hearted and the details of her literary endeavours are scant. I keep picking up her books because I want to know her, Lucy Beatrice Malleson, not J. Kilmeny Keith or Anthony Gilbert or Anne Meredith. And every time I find a character or a scenario that really rings true, that coincides with something I know occurred in her own life, it makes me feel like a detective who has just found a key clue in the never-ending hunt to get just a little bit closer to a mind I have come to greatly admire.
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This episode of Shedunnit was produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. You can find a full list of the books consulted and mentioned at shedunnitshow.com/lucyanthonyandanne I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.
Don’t forget that my new book, A Body Made of Glass, is out in April and currently available for pre-order everywhere books are sold or borrowed. And there’s an exclusive ebook and online launch event just for those who pre-order — check the description of this episode or head to carolinecrampton.com to take part.
Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from Connor McLoughlin.
Thanks for listening.
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