Smallbone Deceased by Michael Gilbert

I stumbled across this book as an Amazon Kindle 99p deal of the day.  I liked the title and fancied reading something a bit different.  Michael Gilbert was a crime writer and a lawyer who published books from the 1940s until just after the turn of the century and Smallbone Deceased is his masterpiece.

The crime, the death of the eponymous Smallbone, is discovered in a law firm in the famous Lincoln's Inn, one of the more prestigious addresses in legal London.  I'm not a lawyer but the setting is well drawn with characters that resonate well today, even though the book is 70 years old.  I've only ever spent a couple of months living in London but I could still feel the city in the words of the book.

A bit of internet research taught me that Gilbert published many crime novels, often with recurring characters (some of whom appear in Smallbone Deceased), but sadly few of them are available electronically.  Hundreds of thousands of books have been published in English over the past few centuries and only a small fraction are available electronically.  Hopefully more of Gilbert's work will appear on the Kindle in the future.

Worth a read.