[British Library Crime Classics 71] • Death in Captivity

While it has many of the elements of the classic detective story, it is also a gripping novel of mounting suspense that takes place in a 1943 prisoner of war camp for British officers in northern Italy—it was the first of Gilbert's numerous later works that would feature suspense and danger as much or more as elements of detection. Gilbert himself had been a British officer during the war, was captured, and interned in an Italian camp. He escaped and spent several months making his way through the Italian countryside trying to reach the British lines. Much of this book apparently reflects his own experiences. It was the basis of a 1959 British film, Danger Within (Breakout in the United States), that closely followed the events in the book. H.R.F. Keating, who wrote Gilbert's obituary for The Guardian, said that "Gilbert's time as a PoW prompted Death In Captivity (1952), surely the only whodunnit set in a prisoner-of-war camp. (wikipedia)