The most celebrated of Michael Gilbert's mysteries, and deservedly so, 1950's Smallbone Deceased offers a wonderful ant's-nest look into a firm of solicitors who find an unwanted corpse among the office paperwork. Specifically, the body of Marcus Smallbone is discovered stuffed into an air-tight deed box, and it is left to Inspector Hazlerigg to determine not only who killed and hid the trustee but also when the murder took place. Fortunately, the Inspector has an ally on the inside: Henry Bohun, a newly hired lawyer with enough autonomy and intelligence to follow his own paths of investigation. It is an effective pairing, a nice balance of official policing and amateur sleuthing with both figures thoughtful and intuitive; it creates a respectful equality that doesn't usually occur in the pages of mystery fiction, where the amateur so often shows the professional the error of his ways.
Featured in his fun genre overview The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, GAD historian Martin Edwards writes that Smallbone Deceased is "packed with incidental pleasures," and I completely agree. There is much to enjoy in this well-plotted story, and Gilbert proves to be very adept at wry characterization. Told through an understatedly humorous third-person narration, the author sketches his cast of partners and secretaries with singular and observant details. We meet the rotund, approachable Mr. Craine; the petty, dyspeptic and insecure Mr. Birley; Mr. Horniman Junior, reluctantly assuming the mantle he inherited from his beloved father, Mr. Horniman Senior; pleased-with-himself office wit John Cove; and the four secretaries, Misses Bellbas, Cornel, Mildmay, and Chittering, each with their respective strengths and weaknesses. Furthermore, the underpinning psychology of these characters feels truthful – part of what an actor would call his or her character's "given circumstances" – from Bob Horniman's antipathy to follow in his father's celebrated footsteps to one lonely secretary's dalliance with an office employee.
The mystery at heart is a good one, smartly clued and one that becomes more immediate and intricate when a second after-hours murder occurs. There are only two minor points that briefly pulled me out of the story. (Do note that neither point detracts too much from an otherwise highly satisfying reading experience.)
The mystery at heart is a good one, smartly clued and one that becomes more immediate and intricate when a second after-hours murder occurs. There are only two minor points that briefly pulled me out of the story. (Do note that neither point detracts too much from an otherwise highly satisfying reading experience.)
First, for a tale that builds its world so realistically, the set-piece of the novel is an office deed box so large that a small adult body can be contorted and pushed inside. It is also, we are told, one that can be hermetically sealed. I don't doubt that Michael Gilbert, a solicitor himself, knows whereof he writes, but surely an office box of that size (and one that a secretary at one point is said to move and use as a stepladder) would resemble at best a small trunk or, if elongated with multiples stacked upright, the drawers of a morgue. That's a lot of space for a lone client's paperwork storage. Still, as the vaudevillians have said and as I have written before regarding implausible details in mystery fiction: you buy the premise, you buy the bit.
The second niggling detail only arrives at the mystery's solution. While Barzun and Taylor, in their Catalogue of Crime, praise the "two splendid murders" and assert that "the motives are good," I would humbly submit that one motive is good – with a hiding-in-plain-sight clue that is quite masterful – while the other came as a surprise, almost to the point of being an explanatory afterthought. It invited me to return to what I knew about that character (in a story that handles character psychology so efficiently and successfully) to see if I might have arrived at the motive before it was stated. And the verdict was… kind of, but not really. It presumes a rationale for murder where one generally wouldn't be, and Gilbert seems to be aware of this: he even has his amateur detective Henry Bohun state that "the real reason, the inner reason for [the crime] I don't suppose we shall ever know."
If you have not yet read Smallbone Deceased, don't let my magnification of the sole two sticking points (for me) deter you from sampling a wonderful workplace mystery. Characterization, tone, and plot support one another to create an excellent reading experience. And if you want a second, third, or fourth opinion, you need only look to my colleagues for their reactions: visit Tracy at Bitter Tea and Mystery, J.F. Norris at Pretty Sinister Books, Les at Classic Mysteries, Kate at crossexaminingcrime, Nick Fuller at The Grandest Game in the World, and Martin Edwards' Crime Writing Blog.
If you have not yet read Smallbone Deceased, don't let my magnification of the sole two sticking points (for me) deter you from sampling a wonderful workplace mystery. Characterization, tone, and plot support one another to create an excellent reading experience. And if you want a second, third, or fourth opinion, you need only look to my colleagues for their reactions: visit Tracy at Bitter Tea and Mystery, J.F. Norris at Pretty Sinister Books, Les at Classic Mysteries, Kate at crossexaminingcrime, Nick Fuller at The Grandest Game in the World, and Martin Edwards' Crime Writing Blog.
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