Michael Gilbert

• Born: July 17, 1912
• Birthplace: Billinghay, Lincolnshire, England
• Died: February 8, 2006
• Place of death: Luddesdown, Kent, England

Types of Plot: Espionage; police procedural; thriller; amateur sleuth; courtroom drama

Principal Series: Inspector Hazlerigg, 1947-1983; Patrick Petrella, 1959-1993; Daniel Joseph Calder and Samuel Behrens, 1967-1982; William Mercer, 1972-1997; Luke Pagan, 1995-1998

Contribution

Michael Gilbert’s career spanned more than half a century (his first book was actually written in 1930) and covered a wide range, including close to thirty novels, three or four hundred short stories (his favorite form), several stage plays, and many television and radio plays. Hence, as Gilbert himself said, it “is impossible in a brief space to make any useful summary” of his works. Gilbert was proud of treating “lightly and amusingly many subjects that would not have been touched thirty years ago.” He asked, “What is a writer to do if he is not allowed to entertain?”

Ellery Queenpraised Gilbert as the “compleat professional,” one who was “in complete control of his material,” whose plots originated from a compassionate knowledge of people and a “first-hand knowledge of law, war, and living, nourished by a fertile imagination that never fails him.” He called Gilbert’s writing droll, his wit dry, his characterizations credible. Anthony Boucher, critic for The New York Times, labeled Gilbert’s collection of spy stories Game Without Rules (1967) “short works of art,” in fact “the second best volume of spy short stories ever published,” outranked only by W. Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden: Or, The British Agent (1928). Others called Gilbert one of the finest of the post-World War II generation of detective writers. He had the disconcerting ability to mix the elegant and the harsh, to charm with witty exchanges, and to shock with amoral realism. He wrote about the work of divisional detectives and police foot soldiers and the potential contributions of the general public, subjects that were largely neglected by other mystery and detective authors. He captured the resilience of the young, the suspicions of the old, the humanity of police officers, and the drama of the court.

Biography

Michael Francis Gilbert was born in Billinghay in Lincolnshire, England, the son of Bernard Samuel Gilbert and Berwyn Minna (née Cuthbert) Gilbert, both writers. He was educated at St. Peter’s School, Seaford, Sussex, and Blundell’s School. Influenced by his uncle, Sir Maurice Gwyer, lord chief justice of India, he decided on a legal career and taught at a preparatory school in Salisbury while studying law at the University of London, where he received an LL.B. with honors in 1937.

In 1939, Gilbert joined the Royal Horse Artillery. He served in North Africa and Europe (mainly Italy) from 1939 to 1945, was promoted to major, and received mentions in dispatches. Gilbert was captured in North Africa and imprisoned in Tunis and in Italy. His Death in Captivity (1952), a classic escape story involving a murder in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp, builds convincingly on these experiences, while Sky High (1955) treats a soldier’s postwar adjustment difficulties. Death Has Deep Roots (1951) and The Night of the Twelfth (1976) refer to “the hate and the fear, the hysteria and the exaggeration and the heroism” of the Occupation and to details such as “The Network of Eyes” used by the French Resistance to keep track of Gestapo officers and collaborators. The computer engineer protagonist of The Long Journey Home (1985) covers territory engraved in Gilbert’s mind from those wartime days, as he makes an arduous hike through Italy and France, pursued by mafiosi.

After the war, Gilbert worked as a solicitor (1947-1951), rising in 1952 to become a partner in the law firm of Trower, Still, and Kealing. He married Roberta Mary Marsden and had five daughters and two sons. He became a founding member of the British Crime Writers Association in 1953 and joined many other professional organizations. He was fellow mystery writer Raymond Chandler’s legal adviser at one time and drew up the latter’s will. In 1960, he acted as legal adviser to the government of the Middle Eastern nation of Bahrain, an experience that provided the background for The Ninety-Second Tiger (1973), an adventure/romance about a mythical Middle Eastern kingdom whose rare mineral deposits make it the center of political conflict. In 1980, Gilbert was made a commander in the Order of the British Empire.

Gilbert retired from the legal profession in 1983, after some thirty-five years of service. For his writing, he received the Swedish Grand Master Award in 1981 and the Edgar Allan Poe Grand Master Award of the Mystery Writers of America in 1987. He also won the Life Achievement Anthony Award at the 1990 Bouchercon in London and in 1994 was awarded the Crime Writers’ Association’s Cartier Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement. In addition to crime novels, Gilbert wrote short stories, teleplays, dramas, and also edited a book of legal anecdotes. In 1998, he announced that Over and Out would be his final novel, although he intended to continue writing short stories. He died in Luddesdown, Kent, England, in February, 2006.

Analysis

With skill, artistry, and care, Michael Gilbert wrote a wide range of works, from strict intellectual puzzles to novels of action and romance, from espionage and Geoffrey Household-type suspense to the police procedural, all set in a variety of finely delineated European and British locales. Varied, too, is his range of topics: archaeology and art (The Etruscan Net, 1969), academia in general and boarding schools in particular (The Night of the Twelfth), cricket (The Crack in the Teacup, 1966), the Church of England (Close Quarters, 1947), libraries (Sky High), and law (Smallbone Deceased, 1950, and Death Has Deep Roots). Gilbert’s characters are well rounded, his authenticity of detail convincing, his sense of people and place compelling and engaging. His plots are complex but believable, substantially and plausibly developed. They involve numerous twists and turns that keep the reader guessing. In fact, Gilbert employs a chess analogy in several works to give a sense of the intricacy of the human game, from castling to checkmate, with the analogy carried out to its fullest in The Final Throw (1982), the story of a deadly game of attrition and loss in which pawns are sacrificed and last-chance risks are taken. His sometimes rapidly shifting points of view add to this intricacy.

Gilbert’s works are all solid entertainment, with intricate plots, clever clues, and numerous suspects who are treated with humor, understatement, and, occasionally, a touch of the satiric. His heroes are usually rugged individualists with quick minds, sharp tongues, and resilient bodies. Many of his books build on his knowledge of the law and of the drama of the British legal system: They describe the internal workings of law firms and delineate courtroom style, legal techniques, and police, forensic, and court procedure. His protagonists, sometimes young solicitors with whom he clearly identifies, use that system to pursue justice and legal revenge.

Smallbone Deceased and Death Has Deep Roots

Set in a solicitor’s office, where a corpse is discovered in a hermetically sealed deedbox, Smallbone Deceased allows the author to satirize gently the eccentric types associated with his own profession, while Death Has Deep Roots exploits its courtroom setting to find an alternate explanation to what seems like an open-and-shut case. One solicitor therein describes his strategy:

I happen to be old-fashioned enough to think that a woman in distress ought to be helped. Especially when she is a foreigner and about to be subjected to the savage and unpredictable caprices of the English judicial system. . . . We’re going to fight a long, dirty blackguarding campaign in which we shall use every subterfuge that the law allows, and perhaps even a few that it doesn’t—you can’t be too particular when you’re defending.

Smallbone Deceased begins with an elevated but boring, eulogistic tribute to the departed head of a law firm, punctuated by irreverent asides from his underlings, then focuses on how those assistants have the training to observe details that will later prove vital to preventing more murder. Death Has Deep Roots demonstrates how a skilled lawyer can use his knowledge of character, the few facts he has, and a team of assistants tracking down discrepancies at home and abroad to undercut the prosecution’s case and at the end reveal truths that lay hidden for far too long. Flash Point (1974), in turn, demonstrates how politics affects law and justice, as the solicitor-hero seeks to reopen a case concerning a former union man now high up in government service and gets so caught up in the extremes of left and right that “justice” becomes very difficult to determine.

A Gilbert novel often depends on an amateur detective, such as Henry Bohun, a statistician, actuary, and solicitor, who is in the right place at the right time to have his imagination challenged by the puzzle of Trustee Smallbone’s unexpected appearance in a deedbox. Gilbert describes him as looking “like some mechanic with a bent for self-improvement, a student of Kant and Schopenhauer, who tended his lathe by day and sharpened his wits of an evening on dead dialecticians.” People trust him and open up to him, and, while he cannot do what the police do so well (take statements, photographs, and fingerprints, and the like), he can get close to those immediately involved and pick up details and relationships to which the police would have no access. In Death Has Deep Roots, there are two amateurs working for the defense, one trying to prove the accused’s claims about her lover, the other investigating the mysterious wartime events in France that bind several witnesses against the accused. In The Empty House (1978), a tall, thin, neophyte insurance investigator, Peter Maniciple, becomes entangled in the machinations of British, Israeli, and Palestinian agents to control secrets unraveled by a kindly geneticist who wants only to escape them all. Liz, a bass in a village church choir, investigates arson and theft in Sky High; an art-gallery owner and an expert on Etruscan art becomes tangled in a net of tomb robbing in The Etruscan Net, while Mr. Wetherall, the headmaster of a London high school in The Night of the Twelfth, wages a one-man war on black-market crime.

Gilbert’s protagonists might use old resistance networks, boarding school companions, kindly innkeepers, or even a network of citizens to help gather information, trace a car, or escape pursuit. At other times they expose the ruthlessness of the bourgeoisie: the colonel who has no qualms about arranging an “accidental” death and the museum representative who condones the illegal origins of his purchase.

Luke Pagan Series

Gilbert embarked on historical fiction with the Luke Pagan series: Ring of Terror (1995), Into Battle (1997), Over and Out, all espionage novels set during World War I. Despite his name, Pagan is a by-the-book detective, but his partner Joe Narrabone, a likeable rogue, has no compunctions about breaking the letter of the law to preserve its spirit.

These historical novels demonstrate Gilbert’s interest in the evolution of espionage tactics during the course of the twentieth century. While dramatizing a search for three Russian revolutionaries who are terrorizing Edwardian London, robbing banks, burning buildings, forging documents, and manufacturing dynamite for an all-out war against the police, Gilbert documents the formation of the MO5 and the efforts that led, against Home Secretary Winston Churchill’s desires, to arm the English police officers. Into Battle illustrates early attempts at code-breaking and brings Pagan into the battlefields of the Western Front. Over and Out uses a punning title to suggest the theme, in which Pagan, now a British Intelligence Corps operative, must defeat a Belgian traitor who lures demoralized British soldiers to desert and join the apparently unstoppable German army.

Violence and Espionage

Gilbert’s characters never shy away from violence. In “The Spoilers,” a story of intimidation and blackmail, a young woman whose dog has been killed and mutilated turns a high-pressure steam hose on the perpetraters. In Roller-Coaster, the media gleefully pursue a racist cop who is known for harassment and assault of London’s West Indians. In “Cross-Over,” a dedicated young spy feels uncomfortable about making love to an enemy agent, and then, the next day, he shoots her dead to save himself and his associates. An older agent assures him, “In this job . . . there is neither right nor wrong. Only expediency.” In “Trembling’s Tours,” a Russian agent is strangled, the cord tied so “deep into the flesh that only the ends could be seen dangling at the front like a parody of a necktie.” Gilbert transmutes this image in Smallbone Deceased, where what looks at first glance “like an aerial view of the Grand Canyon,” with “innumerable fissile crevices, . . . gulfs and gullies,” is instead the “effect of picture-wire on the human neck. . . . Two hundred magnifications.”

The bullet hole in the forehead, the stench of cyanide, the quiet drowning, the mutilated corpse—all must be taken in stride in a milieu of double agents, greed, and deception, for in Gilbert’s world espionage and crime are both games “without rules.” Calder and Behrens’s interrogation methods result in corpses, and their retaliation for a soldier burned to death is to blow up his assassins. Gilbert has no illusions about the horrors of which people are capable in the name of an ideal, a cause, a personal longing, a twisted obsession, or a whim. As one character describes another, “He had seen more brutality, more treachery, more fanaticism, more hatred than had any of his predecessors in war or in peace.”

There is always a touch of the irreverent in Gilbert. Close Quarters, a locked-room mystery set around a cathedral, takes on a church community’s misdeeds and provides an entertaining and mildly satiric look at the Church of England, its canons, its deans, and its vergers. The Crack in the Teacup denigrates minor league politics and local courts, Fear to Tread (1953) takes on the British train system, and The Dust and the Heat (1967) delves into the ruthlessness of the business world. In The Body of a Girl, an honest inspector must deal with malice all around him: “bent policemen, crooked garage owners, suspicious solicitors, dirty old men, and local roundheels.” Roller-Coaster, a police procedural, shows Petrella and his men risibly chafing at the boredom of the procedures, pressures, and bureaucracy of police work, longing to get out into the streets and away from the papers in the in-box on their desks.

Allusions and Ironies

Gilbert’s stories always include interesting historical and literary allusions or quotations, with satiric or ironic subtitles from Jonathan Swift, G. K. Chesterton, William Hazlitt, and others. The protagonist in The Empty House awakens from “a land of dreams” to “ignorant armies” clashing by night “on a darkling plain,” and his friend who would sail away “like Ulysses . . . bored with Ithaca” is destroyed by those battles. In The Night of the Twelfth, student rehearsals of Twelfth Night form a backdrop for the terrors of the sadistic torturing and murder of three, nearly four, young boys; the novel ends with Feste’s song—as if to say that in Gilbert as well as in William Shakespeare, art makes past violence and potential horrors tolerable by showing their defeat but that reality is neither as neat nor as just as an artistic presentation.

Ironies abound: Calder shoots an attractive spy dead, and her deerhound becomes his most beloved companion; young lovers, in the throes of ecstasy, reach out and touch the cold naked foot of a ten-year-old murder victim; the most attractive woman in the story proves the most sadistic, the most warped; the key witnesses for the prosecution prove to be the real murderers; and a charming villain quotes Thucydides while chopping off a victim’s fingers one by one. The stories may involve a debate (such as the one about inefficiency and freedom versus efficiency and a police state in “The Cat Cracker”) or extended analogy (for example, a cricket match compared to warfare psychology or the “cracking” process of the petroleum industry likened to the “cracking” process of Nazi interrogators, both requiring just so much heat or force to achieve the effect without disintegrating the material in the process.

Gilbert’s metaphorical language has won for him much praise. In Death Has Deep Roots, Sergeant Crabbe’s sad realization that a competent past acquaintance is going to try to undercut the police case leads to the following comment: “He bestowed on McCann the look which a St. Bernard might have given if, after a long trek through the snow, he had found the traveler already frozen to death.” Later, one Mousey Jones is described as “a small character who made a living by picking up the crumbs which lie round the wainscoting, and in the dark corners of that big living room of crime, the West End.” The compulsive fascination of detection itself Gilbert sums up as “like trying to finish a crossword puzzle—in a train going headlong toward a crash.”

Gilbert realistically and wittily captures the nuances of small talk, between equals and between those of different social rank, as when an older solicitor corrects a younger secretary for spelling errors:

It would appear . . . that you must imagine me to be a highly moral man. . . . But I’m afraid it won’t do. . . . When I said, “This is a matter which will have to be conducted entirely by principals,” I intended it to be understood that the work would be done by a partner in the firm concerned, not that it would be carried out according to ethical standards.

Gilbert also depicts the traded insults between friends of long acquaintance, the catty remarks between competing women, and the horseplay of men sharing adversity. In fact, Gilbert’s sense of place derives more from a sense of personalities and their interrelations than from actual physical description, though his descriptions of English coastal towns, rugged terrain, and courtroom antics are graphic indeed. He details the inner workings and the routines of offices and institutions, providing maps and timetables, and he convincingly describes cricket matches, drinking bouts, good-natured arguments, prison camps, and boarding schools.

Art Versus Reality

Gilbert is quick to call attention to the differences between what would be expected in a traditional detective story and what happens in the reality of his. The defense lawyer in Blood and Judgement (1959) argues that real-life private detectives do not have the friends, the contacts, the finances or the luck of their fictive counterparts, while the one in Death Has Deep Roots expostulates irritably:

Dammit, . . . this isn’t a detective story. The murderer doesn’t have to be one of the principal characters. It might have been any old enemy of Thoseby’s, who happened to choose that moment to finish him off.

The solicitor-detective in The Crack in the Teacup, in dealing with a corrupt local council, comes to realize that all the good people are not necessarily on the side of what he knows is right, while the one in The Body of a Girl must consider not only the motives of the local citizens but also those of the police.

Related to Gilbert’s concern with art versus reality is his focus on surface illusions and hidden truths. In The Ninety-second Tiger, what worked in the actor-hero’s films proves ludicrous in the face of reality, whose Byzantine twists are always unexpected. The official report in After the Fine Weather (1963) identifies the wrong man as assassin, and the only eyewitness is in peril as she struggles to establish the truth; in turn, the kindly old sea captain in The Empty House proves to be the center of an international storm. In Death of a Favourite Girl (1980), the darling of the television screen proves a spoiled and contrary blackmailer, while the dedicated police officer who demonstrates the investigative failures of his superior proves a devious murderer. Sometimes it takes an outsider to leap the barriers of more orthodox minds and solve the puzzle that has blocked detection. A would-be burglar being held for the police helps a nightwatchman figure out a legal mystery; an actuary sees meaning in a sum that holds no meaning for others; a would-be suicide sees through a faked suicide the police have accepted as genuine. An orthodox mind-set prevents fascist guards from seeing an escape hatch. A simple turn of a kaleidoscope, a shift of the sands, or a change of perspective reveals enemy as heroic friend and trusted ally as deadly enemy. As the puzzle is solved, a shutter is lifted and reality exposed. Clearly, Gilbert’s detective and espionage thrillers rise above the limits of their genre.

Principal Series Characters:

• Inspector Hazlerigg brings to bear a Sherlock Holmes type of ratiocination to solve mysteries. Intelligent, individualistic, and tenacious, Hazlerigg weeds out the irrelevant detail so he can concentrate on key clues and personalities. He alternates between two techniques: staging a ruse (what he calls dropping a grenade) and weaving a net that allows the culprit to be firmly trapped. Hazlerigg has a red face, a heavy build, a well-worn tweed suit, and piercing eyes, the cold gray of the North Sea.
• Patrick Petrella , who deals with blackmail, arson, theft, and murder while rising steadily from constable to detective chief inspector with the metropolitan police, is young, industrious, ambitious, and innovative. He spent his first eight years in Spain and attended the American University of Beirut. Though of Spanish descent, he is unquestionably English, except for his occasional “demon” of a temper. He is a churchgoer, and he marries and becomes a father during the series. He eventually rises to superintendent of the East London dockyards in Roller-Coaster (1993) but retires at the end to work on his father’s farm.
• Daniel Joseph Calder and
• Samuel Behrens , coldly ruthless middle-aged counterintelligence agents who, in a number of short stories, assisted by Calder’s magnificent Persian deerhound, engage in espionage, assassination, and persuasion with quiet efficiency and admirable intelligence. They work for the “E” (External) Branch of the British Joint Services Standing Intelligence Committee and do those jobs so disreputable that none of the other departments will touch them. Neighbors in Kent, they lead deceptively quiet lives, puttering about at beekeeping, hunting, and playing chess. They value decisiveness and ingenuity, characteristics they continually demonstrate themselves. Their opponents often end up with a neat hole in the head or chest.
• William Mercer , the highly individualistic and sensual inspector of The Body of a Girl (1972), is a born rebel and outsider who chose an honest living over a criminal one because of what he calls the “safety factor.” He is a stickler for procedure, requiring careful files with photographs and records of every scrap of evidence. He quits the force for a job in the Middle East but returns in several short stories.
• Luke Pagan , whose gamekeeper father intended him to be a cleric, decides instead to enter the London Metropolitan Police at the age of eighteen. He is young and good looking, attractive to both men and women. Born in 1906 and growing to manhood during World War I, Pagan has an array of talents, including espionage skills and proficiency in several languages, particularly Russian. He rapidly rises from constable to detective to a member of the MO5 (a British Military Operations unit). When the war ends, he pursues a career in law.

Bibliography

Bargainnier, Earl F. Twelve Englishmen of Mystery. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1984. Gilbert is one of the twelve British mystery writers who form the subject of this study.

Dove, George N. The Police Procedural. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1982. Compares Gilbert’s police-procedural fiction to the work of other writers in the subgenre. Bibliographic references and index.

Gilbert, Michael. Interview by Mike Stotter. Mystery Scene 53 (May-June, 1996): 30-31, 66. Brief but illuminating interview with the author.

Gilbert, Michael. “Quantity and Quality.” In Colloquium on Crime: Eleven Renowned Mystery Writers Discuss Their Work, edited by Robin W. Winks. New York: Scribner, 1986. Gilbert’s take on both his own fiction and the craft of mystery fiction as such.

Gilbert, Michael. “Quite Simply a Great Man.” In Julian Symons Remembered: Tributes from Friends, collected by Jack Walsdorf and Kathleen Symons. Council Bluffs, Iowa: Yellow Barn Press, 1996. Gilbert’s tribute to his fellow author is revealing of his own values and beliefs with regard to the craft of writing.

Jecks, Michael. Foreword to Crime on the Move: The Official Anthology of the Crime Writers’ Association, edited by Martin Edwards. London: Do-Not, 2005. Jecks comments on Gilbert’s story, “Case for Gourmets,” as well as on the work of twenty-one other contributors to this anthology.

Penzler, Otto. “Patrick Petrella.” In The Great Detective. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. Argues for the place of Gilbert’s creations among history’s greatest fictional detectives.

Roth, Marty. Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. A post-structural analysis of the conventions of mystery and detective fiction. Examines 138 short stories and works from the 1840’s to the 1960’s. Helps place Gilbert in the broader genre.

Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2005. An important entry in the cultural studies of police and detective fiction, looking at the genre both as revealing of and influencing the cultures that produce it. Provides a perspective for understanding Gilbert. Bibliographic references and index.