Death in Fancy Dress is a classic whodunit which first appeared in 1933. Lucy Malleson (who hid her gender as well as her name by adopting the pseudonym Anthony Gilbert) was by then already well-established as a detective novelist. She’d begun with a couple of books under another pen name, J. Kilmeny (a pun on “kill many”) Keith, before adopting the Gilbert name for a series of mysteries featuring the Liberal MP Scott Egerton.
Still in her early thirties, she determined to try something different. Two years earlier, she’d experimented with a non-series Gilbert novel, The Case against Andrew Fane, and now she decided to write another stand-alone. The result was a country house mystery that, despite its conventional setting, veered away from orthodoxy. The story is narrated by a young lawyer, Tony Keith, and he and his friend Jeremy Freyne become embroiled in a strange case which seems to centre on Feltham Abbey.
“It’s bound to arouse suspicion in the official mind,” the two men are told, “when a wave of suicide sweeps over a country, as it has swept over this one during the past twelve months… men and women have been committing suicide with alarming frequency; and it’s noticeable that they are practically all people in what we term the superior walks of life. Either they’re people of rank and position, or they’re people with money.”
The authorities have discovered a pattern to the deaths: “It appeared that in every case mysterious telephone calls had been received shortly before the death. The victim, even if in perfect health and activity up till that time, developed nervousness, irritability, an increased jumpiness whenever the telephone rang or the post arrived, and then came the final act of despair… In practically every case, money in quite large sums had been raised, sometimes to the man’s or woman’s ruination.”
The conclusion to be drawn is clear: “Blackmail on a tremendous scale.” And so the central question is: who is the blackmailer? Before the mystery is solved, a fancy dress ball is held at Feltham Abbey, and someone is found dead in the grounds. The guests at the Abbey form a “closed circle” of suspects in the classic tradition of Golden Age detective stories, and the puzzle is eventually solved in pleasing fashion.
The book met with critical acclaim. Dorothy L. Sayers, in an insightful review for the Sunday Times on 2 July 1933, said: “Death in Fancy Dress has at least one uncommon merit. It contrives to persuade us that something really serious and unpleasant is taking place at Feltham Abbey. So often in a detective story trivial irregularities like blackmail and murder seem scarcely to ruffle the placid current of domestic affairs… Here, the atmosphere of suspense and uneasiness really does pervade the household.” Sayers praised the “remarkably well-drawn and sympathetic cast of characters” and the clever way in which the reader’s attention was directed away from the truth.
Unfortunately, in an era of economic misery, the novel did not earn its author commensurate financial success. As she said in her memoir Three-a-Penny: “By this time a thing called The Slump was beginning to set most of us by the ears. Books were affected, like everything else. Not only did our sales cease to increase according to expectations, but our American markets began to fail, until for a good many of us they no longer existed… I began to get panicky and cast round for some fresh way of bringing the necessary grist to the mill.”
She must have found it galling that Death in Fancy Dress, like her two previous books featuring Scott Egerton, failed to find an American publisher. Her career was at a turning point, but she was determined to keep going. She toyed with the idea of writing romantic fiction or a thriller, before deciding on a more ambitious course: she experimented with a psychological crime novel under a new pen-name, Anne Meredith. The result was Portrait of a Murderer. This novel was again well received, and it was taken up in the USA, but once again it did not make her rich; ironically, the paperback reprint published in the British Library Crime Classics series in 2017, sold much better than the original edition.
Gilbert didn’t give up, and continued to ring the changes with her writing. Scott Egerton was given another couple of cases, and she created a French police detective called Dupuy, who featured in three books. But her breakthrough did not come until she created the rascally solicitor Arthur Crook, who made his debut in Murder by Experts in 1936, and established himself as her principal protagonist. During the course of a career that continued until the 1970s, Crook became an increasingly likeable character, and carried a business card bearing the slogan: “Linen discreetly washed in private. Danger no object.”
Lucy Beatrice Malleson was a Londoner, born on Ash Wednesday in 1899. At the age of sixteen, she trained as a secretary, and over the years her employers included the Coal Association and the Red Cross. But writing was her first love. In Three-a-Penny, published as by Anne Meredith, she said: “When I am not writing I am not more than half-alive. I am miserable, hopeful, and dejected by turns.” Her credo was: “It is people and not the things that happen to them who are interesting.” She enjoyed writing short stories, and two which she contributed to the Detection Club’s anthology Detection Medley, “Horseshoes for Luck” and “The Cockroach and the Tortoise,” are included in this book.
She was a modest and likeable woman, as was noted by her friend and Detection Club colleague Michael Gilbert in a letter to The Times following her death in 1973. She was aware of the limits of her talent, but she made the best use of it. As she said in her memoir, “I don’t feel guilty that my books don’t sell ten thousand copies, although I should love them to do so… When I was young, I confidently thought they would; when they didn’t I was astounded, but it never occurred to me, when my average sales were 1,250 copies, to abandon writing and do something more lucrative… That’s one reason why writing is such fun—it’s so chancy.” I like to think that she would be amused as well as delighted to know that this long-forgotten detective novel is enjoying a fresh life in the twenty-first century.