Out for the Kill by Anthony Gilbert

Out for the Kill by Anthony Gilbert

 published 1960

The Woman in Red by Anthony Gilbert

published 1941

This is a frequent occurrence round here: someone in recent weeks recommended Out for the Kill, and I can’t remember who, or when, or what they said about it. As ever, I will give credit if you remind me. [ADDED LATER: It was Marty of course! See comments below]

I always enjoy Anthony Gilbert’s books (under whatever name – for more see this post and this one or click on the tag below) without rushing to feel I must read them all.  

I recently read also The Woman in Red, from 20 years earlier, which I considered to have a good setup but a dull playing out of the missing-young-woman plot. (The book was turned into a film in 1945 with the inviting title My Name is Julia Ross).

There are points of interest in comparing the two. Both feature the series character Arthur Crook – a vulgar, shady but delightful lawyer. This is his description from The Woman in Red.

A fat, rather common-looking little man was standing in the doorway. He looked as though he’d be more at home on the race course yelling the odds or wearing a stiff white apron, garnished with a knife sharpener on a long steel chain, shouting the bargain prices of meat in some Saturday night market. He wasn’t remotely what any of them thought a lawyer should be like.

And this too is from the earlier book:

Mr. Crook lived very snugly in Earl’s Court; it suited him to perfection. Mayfair or Belgravia would have been ridiculous and pretentious; Hempstead and Golders Green were ruled out because so many of his dubious clients lived there. But about Earl’s Court there is a sober respectability allied with thrift. This respectability delighted Crook; he said it tickled his sense of humour. He occupied one floor in one of those big houses built towards the end of the last century for well-to-do middle-class families. It had five floors and a steep basement and Crook said in his irreverent way it reeked of hopeful daughters and discreetly-soured spinsters.

In the later book:

No 2 Brandon St had lost its delightful air of shabbiness and secrecy that had previously made it such a fitting background for his activities, and was homesick for the blacked-out windows and for the uncarpeted wooden stairs which he had known for 20 years. … An enterprising company had bought the house and turned it into a nest of fashionable modern flats in which Arthur Crook himself was an anachronism.

And in Out for the Kill, Crook gets very involved with other tenants in the house: a middle-aged lady, Miss Chisholm, has apparently disappeared. Vanishing ladies are quite the thing in Gilbert books - both The Woman in Red and The Spinster’s Secret are built on the idea, and there are others. Gilbert is very good at building up a horrible atmosphere in those circumstances, it is one of her talents.

Here he teams up with another tenant, a young woman called Kay, and the in-house handyman, and the astrologer on the ground floor. There’s an unexpected line in TV sales: there’s a young man selling them door to door. He thinks Crook will like ITV, in his business they expect ‘snooty parts of Kensington’ to go for the BBC. ‘None of these phoney quizzes which they couldn’t answer anyway’, but he is clear where he places Crook and his location: commercials and a loud police drama.

That’s a side issue – we’re still chasing Miss Chisholm, who runs a millinery business. She makes and decorates hats, and has strong opinions. The younger Kay is an artist, and tells this story:

‘Miss Chisholm is rather alarming. She banged on my door once and held out an illustration I’d done for a magazine. “No woman of taste, as according to the text this creature is, would wear that kind of hat with that kind of suit.”’

The hats, the shop, the business and the decorations keep turning up during the story, which makes for good Clothes in Books trails. And there is even some hat detection (see this Maigret book for another excellent example of this niche area).

When a hat turns up, Kay (again) knows: ‘There’s certainly something wrong… they’re all the rage this year… Everything depends on line… they’re never never trimmed like this.’ Crook tries to argue that Miss C ‘goes in for decoration in a big way’, but Kay knows better.

So what is going on? I don’t want to spoiler, although this is very guessable, but I have recently realized that I have covered so many books on the blog that there is nothing new… so if you want a  minor-spoiler clue as to the ins and outs, go and look at this post for a hint. If not, don’t.

There is a most unlikely suggestion at one point. ‘I suppose you haven’t heard any orgies at any time Mr Crook?’

‘I wouldn’t notice,’ said Crook regretfully. ‘I’m not nosy till I’m paid to be.’

The book turns rather thriller-ish in the final third, as Gilbert had a tendency to do: I preferred the investigating and visiting the hat shop. But still it was a good read.

There’s an item for Clothes in Books Furniture Watch (a very occasional series): ‘he sunk onto a rather womanish-looking divan affair in the living room’. Now what does this either mean or imply? Is it as obvious as it seems, although it doesn’t seem to fit with anything else in the book? I looked at a similar coded reference in a much earlier Georgette Heyer detective book, but that seemed clearer.

The astrologer, Mrs Sagan, has opinions on hats which I enjoyed:

'You expect something for your money when you pay her prices, and if you only get a bit of duck’s feather that probably your fishmonger would give you for nothing if you made love to him nicely, or a bit of black net sprinkled with gilded butterflies, well, you do feel cheated.’

I did a blogpost on Celia Fremlin’s Uncle Paul back in 2018 and it contains this sentence:

And there is the best use of a hatbox in any book – yes, even better than Anthony Gilbert’s The Clock in the Hatbox, recently on the blog, or this early YA book, The Gates of Bannerdale.

… so there is definite Gilbert form on hatboxes. This book’s use of the hatbox would come fourth I think. (Hatbox Watch as a future feature?)

My dear friend Chrissie gave me a wonderful book from 1957 called How to Make a Hat, and the illustrations are from there.