Michael Gilbert, R. I. P.

Independent Online Edition > Obituaries: "In 1947, the publishers Hodder & Stoughton - at the time not renowned for puffing their first-time authors (as Eric Ambler had very quickly discovered a decade earlier) - issued a detective novel called Close Quarters to something like a fanfare. On the dust-jacket and to the trade they announced 'a new and coming name in Crime Fiction. Watch his career. With Close Quarters you are in on the beginning.'

This, for a publisher, was an unusually perceptive judgement. Michael Gilbert, their tiro author, garnered not only critical but reader praise from the start, and became, in a writing career that lasted nearly 60 years (his last book, The Curious Conspiracy, a volume of short stories, was published in his 90th year), one of a handful of British crime writers who were acclaimed and respected on both sides of the Atlantic."