Lucy Beatrice Malleson (1899-1973) was a British author most well known for her creation of Arthur G. Crook, an entertaining beer-drinking lawyer whose ethics do not bear scrutiny. Crook had some 50 adventures published under the pseudonym Anthony Gilbert between 1936 and 1973. Malleson also used the name J. Kilmeny Keith and later she adopted the name Anne Meredith for her straight fiction. Before Crook came to life, Anthony Gilbert wrote mysteries about an aspiring politician named Scott Egerton. Crook turned out to be so popular, Gilbert dropped Egerton and focused on her Cockney lawyer.
The British Library has reprinted Portrait of a Murderer, the only mystery by Anne Meredith. The Crook books have been out of print for a long time. Orion reissued several of them through its The Murder Room imprint and they can readily be found through the Internet. Other titles are harder to find.
Crook insisted that he only defended innocent people, which meant his usual defense was to find someone else to accuse of the crime. He is not a courtroom lawyer, he does his best work as an investigator, stepping well outside his role as a barrister.
By the time his 18th case rolled around, Crook’s character and modus operandi were well established but no less colorful. In Lift Up the Lid (Collins Crime Club, 1948), released in the US under the title The Innocent Bottle (Barnes, 1949), Crook doesn’t appear until about a third into the book. By that time the situation of the main character Rose East, trapped in a marriage to a jealous and controlling older man in ill health, is clear. At the insistence of the attending physician, a nurse has been brought in to assist with the care of old Mr. East and she has done everything she can to wring small gifts and cash out of her patient while turning him against his wife.
On the afternoon before a planned trip to London to visit his solicitor, which East’s doctor had warned him against, East died quietly in his sleep. The local doctor was prepared to issue a death certificate but the nurse was confident that East was going to alter his will in her favor while in London and she was enraged at the lost opportunity. She accused Rose East of murdering her husband so fervently that an autopsy had to be performed. The autopsy found that East died of an overdose of sleeping medicine, the kind his young wife used. It was a short step to arresting her for murder and there matters stood when someone brought Crook in.
While the story started off slowly, the action started hopping when Crook arrived. He tended to have that effect. Add some poison pen letters and a great plot twist, and this was an absorbing read. What it lacks, though, is enough suspects to actually conceal the killer, which I guessed fairly early. It is otherwise classic Crook.
For the record I have no idea what the title Lift Up the Lid refers to; no reference to a box or a chest or anything similar is in the book. If it is a literary allusion, it has gone over my head.
Fans of the series will enjoy this one. Since there is little character development in these books, a new reader can start almost anywhere and this title is as good a place as any, provided it can be found on the secondary market.