Riddle of a Lady by Anthony Gilbert

 

Riddle of a Lady Anthony Gilbert

published 1956

 

This was recommended to me after my recent post on Secretaries in Books appeared, and indeed we do have here a Queen of the Typewriter in ‘a long unfashionable coat and a hat with a wreath of flowers round it.’. Miss Bainbridge works for Henry Greatorex, in a small town family solicitors’ firm.

Henry is a man of charm, very attractive to women, and completely, unabashedly selfish. He is about to land in big trouble…

He has been having a long-term one-night-a-week affair with a woman in the town. She is not in her first youth, but is strikingly attractive and a magnet to men. Henry thinks they see their relationship in the same light-hearted way, but he is wrong. Mind you, I wonder how much it would matter that he, a single gentleman, had had an affair with a woman of his own age? It is claimed that he would be ostracized, and unable to marry someone else, if his affair became public, but I don’t believe that… Even his brother says ‘there was never anything of the monk about Henry, and with unmarried men of his age it’s generally one thing or the other’ in a tolerant way.

Here is Stella getting ready in her jade wool dress:

Stella Foster put on her new green dress and contemplated the evening’s possibilities. Stella was that displaced person in modern social life, the deserted married woman who has never sued for divorce and is no longer in a position to do so. When Henry first met her, five years earlier, she had reminded him of one of the figures in Botticelli’s “Primavera.”

She attracted people, men in particular, as the sun attracts the bud. She couldn’t go into a saloon bar—at the Coach and Horses, say, or the Horn of Plenty—without someone coming along and wanting to buy her a drink. They were her version of the Women’s Institute, she said.

Here is Henry also getting ready to go out:

he reached home soon after five, poured himself out his customary glass of sherry, but a little earlier than usual, and changed his grey suit for a beautifully-cut country tweed. He pitched his silver-grey hat on to a shelf, and put on a soft chocolate-coloured monstrosity (the London brothers would have said) and, every inch the country squire, prepared for the evening.

 

Henry is cleverly-drawn – he is awful, but he is also funny and straightforward and has no illusions. I liked his breath-taking criticism of his brother who died in the Spanish Civil War:

He had never sympathised with Christopher, intervening in a fight not his own. What would the English think if a Spanish republican force landed on their shores to take part in a civil war? Well, that point at least didn’t arise. It took the conceited English to think up the Crusades, reflected Henry, turning into the High Street and marching along as if he intended to reach the end of the world.

 

I liked that ‘the end of the world’ here – Gilbert (really a woman called Lucy Malleson) can always surprise you with a turn of phrase or unlikely moment:

Here Mr. Saunders looked so much like a mixture of Shylock and Uriah Heep that the inspector wanted to hit him.

Henry’s nephew, very disapproving, goes to visit an associate of his uncle (this is quite an involved story) and is surprised by the welcome he receives:

“Anyone connected with you would be persona grata there, she implied.”

“Could you,” murmured Henry, “contrive to look a little less staggered by the discovery?”

We know Stella was very attractive because series sleuth/solicitor/wideboy Arthur Crook noticed her by chance one evening in the pub, so has a headstart in solving the mystery.

He wasn’t one for the dames, he would have told you, was no more moved by her feminine qualities than if she had been a lady baboon, but he knew trouble when he saw it.

He takes splendid offence at Henry’s early remark that he is

“out for lost causes.”

 “My causes,” Crook told him, unwontedly frosty for the moment, “soon get themselves found once I’m on the scene…”

And indeed we have every faith.

Crook says to one of the many men in the case: “you thought of her as a nice piece of homework. . . .” a phrase I had never heard, but now have found in three different books in quick succession. Here and here.

Although there isn’t a wide range of suspects, the detection is tight and enjoyable, I was almost there by the end but might have chosen the wrong one…

Anthony Gilbert did what she did very well, and I thought this was a fine example of the books. I am a big fan of Arthur Crook, particularly when he cuts through the snobbery and pretensions of the other characters.

There are a good few Gilbert books on the blog.

Green dress from NYPL.

Lady in coat and hat from the Imperial War Museum