The Scarlet Button

Arthur Crook #14

by Anthony Gilbert

Dust Jacket blurb:
More excitement, suspense and action in packed into this new mystery than any preceding book by Anthony Gilbert

James Chigwell was a blackmailer, a human spider who fattened on the blood of other men, on their misfortunes, on their mistakes. But retribution came to Chigwell. One of his victims at last rebelled against his devilish iniquity and bludgeoned him to death. But who among Chigwell's many victims had, with the final courage of despair, summoned up the resolution to slay his tormentor?

The Scarlet Button or Murder Is Cheap begins like an inverted novel. Kenneth Jardine, a nerve-ridden young pilot, visits the spider-like blackmailer James Chigwell; we leap over an asterisk; Chigwell is dead, his brains battered in. But did Kenneth kill him? He conceals his visit; he has blood on his coat and on his stick. But, the police soon arrest Rupert Burke, a civil servant, who was another of Chigwell’s victims, but release him when Kenneth steps forward to clear him. When Kenneth is arrested, his barmaid friend, Bess Carter, calls in lawyer Arthur Crook.

Bess Carter was a golden haired, well rounded barmaid...and no lady. She went to Crook for help because she wouldn't believe the man she loved was a killer--even when she saw the tell-tale crimson splotches on his shirt...or when she found the heavy stick he carried, crusted with a dead man's blood.

This novel is at once grim and entertaining, a excellent and unusual detective mystery, featuring, of course, the celebrated lawyer/detective, Arthur Crook.

Genres: Mystery

169 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1944

About the author

Anthony Gilbert was the pen name of Lucy Malleson an English crime writer. She also wrote non-genre fiction as Anne Meredith , under which name she also published one crime novel. She also wrote an autobiography under the Meredith name, Three-a-Penny (1940).

Her parents wanted her to be a schoolteacher but she was determined to become a writer. Her first mystery novel followed a visit to the theatre when she saw The Cat and the Canary then, Tragedy at Freyne, featuring Scott Egerton who later appeared in 10 novels, was published in 1927.

She adopted the pseudonym Anthony Gilbert to publish detective novels which achieved great success and made her a name in British detective literature, although many of her readers had always believed that they were reading a male author. She went on to publish 69 crime novels, 51 of which featured her best known character, Arthur Crook. She also wrote more than 25 radio plays, which were broadcast in Great Britain and overseas.

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 ethicality to clear him or her.

The first Crook novel, Murder by Experts, was published in 1936 and was immediately popular. The last Crook novel, A Nice Little Killing, was published in 1974.

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 never married, and evidence of her feminism is elegantly expressed in much of her work.