Don't Open The Door by Anthony Gilbert

Don't Open The Door is a golden-age mystery by Anthony Gilbert. I have collected a number of Gilbert mysteries - his series character is Arthur Crook, an unorthodox lawyer and detective - and halfway through this novel, I realized it was also published under the title Death Lifts The Latch, of which I have two hardcover copies already!

Arthur Crook looks out his office window into the impenetrable London fog, knowing there will be business for the police, the doctor, and the mortician. One of those fogs where anything might happen.

Young Nora Deane emerged from the station at Charlbury, on the way to nurse her next patient, Mrs. Newstead. Lost in the fog, she is helped by young Sammy, who although he cannot see her, feels she is someone to be seen more of. Arriving late at night, they find Mr. Newstead edgy and flustered, and Mrs. Newstead quite alone. A case of nerves, Nora is told, suffering delusions from sitting alone and thinking. She is not to be disturbed until morning, but Nora checks on her, and hears her plaintive cry: "Herbert - You get him. You understand". She is found dead in the morning of a heart attack.

Mr. Newstead does not call the doctor or police, lest awkward questions be asked, and Nora goes on to her next job. But, not before informing Mrs. Newstead's most distressed brother Herbert Webster of the events, who is convinced Mr. Newstead is as shady as a country lane. The man managed to put her entire $12,000 pound fortune into his own name, and must have done away with his wife. It wasn't in Herbert's nature to allow Newstead to get away unchallenged, perhaps he'll seek his own justice.

Nora's next patient is enraptured with the ghoulish items of the daily news, and tells Nora Mr. Newstead has been found dead in a local pit. Obviously Mr. Newstead killed his wife, and her brother Herbert killed Mr. Newstead. Case closed?

Suddenly, Nora is kidnapped, and Sammy enlists detective Arthur Crook to help find her - 'a thickset man in a ginger-coloured suit with a ginger-coloured hat on the back of his head, and a voice as ginger as the rest of him'. Also on the case is reporter Roger Trentham, whose newspaper fans the flames of The Lone Pit Murder.

With Crook, Sammy, and Roger on the trail to rescue Nora, there are about 80 pages of guessing which slows the pace considerably. That said, the other character joining them in the hunt is none other that the murderer, and if you think you know who that is, that obvious person of whom you have been told it was from the beginning, you might be very wrong.

Don't Open The Door is the 15th Arthur Crook mystery, one of over 60 crime novels penned by Anthony Gilbert, a pseudonym of Lucy Beatrice Malleson, also writing as Anne Meredith. In 2017, the British Library Crime Classics imprint republished the Meredith title Portrait of a Murderer, reviving the book and selling more than it did originally in 1933, followed by a reissue of Gilbert's Death In Fancy Dress.

Malleson's 1941 mystery The Vanishing Corpse was filmed as They Met In The Dark, and The Mouse Who Wouldn't Play Ball was filmed in 1944 as Candles At Nine. Her 1941 novel The Woman In Red, featuring Arthur Crook, was notably filmed as the terrific film noir My Name Is Julia Ross in 1945 (completely removing Crook from the story).

Diverting entertainment, with original characters, set in the dense 1945 London fog, but the energy spent a little too soon, with a slow roll to the finish.

My other Anthony Gilbert review:

The Vanishing Corpse

1945 / Paperback / 192 pages