The Scarlet Button

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.

Anthony Gilbert was the pen name of Lucy Beatrice Malleson. Born in London, she spent all her life there, and her affection for the city is clear from the strong sense of character and place in evidence in her work. She published 69 crime novels, 51 of which featured her best known character, Arthur Crook, a vulgar London lawyer totally (and deliberately) unlike the aristocratic detectives, such as Lord Peter Wimsey, who dominated the mystery field at the time. She also wrote more than 25 radio plays, which were broadcast in Great Britain and overseas. 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 was an early member of the British Detection Club, which, along with Dorothy L. Sayers, she prevented from disintegrating during World War II. Malleson published her autobiography, Three-a-Penny, in 1940, and wrote numerous short stories, which were published in several anthologies and in such periodicals as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and The Saint. The short story 'You Can't Hang Twice' received a Queens award in 1946. She never married, and evidence of her feminism is elegantly expressed in much of her work.