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BLOOD AND JUDGEMENT:
The Detective
Fiction of Michael Gilbert
“For more than thirty years Michael Gilbert has been writing intelligent, well-crafted detective stories and thrillers… The problem a writer like Gilbert has is to produce within what he calls the ‘very useful framework of a who-dun-it’ books that acknowledge the drastic ethical changes of the past twenty years without outraging his own essentially conservative feelings. He is too conscious of the society he lives in to be able to ignore it, as Agatha Christie did in her later books. In the result his characteristic books offer an odd, attractive blend of the sophisticated and the old-fashioned.”
–
Julian Symons, Times Literary Supplement,
Michael Gilbert is perhaps the
most successful
of modern detective writers, for he believes that the purpose of
fiction is not
to examine psychological abnormalities in great detail but to entertain
– to tell
a story. This he does extremely well,
whether it be the investigations of Inspector Hazelrigg in cathedral
close or
lawyer’s office (often helped by the lawyer Francis Bohun), the
gripping and morally
dubious short stories featuring the gentlemanly spies Messrs. Calder
and Behrens
or the police procedurals featuring the half-Spanish Inspector Petrella. Gilbert’s work is remarkably diverse –
although characters recur, no two books are alike, for they have an
entirely different
approach (straightforward thriller, Le Carré-type espionage, big
business satire,
orthodox detective story) and often an entirely different tone (compare
the
comedy of Sky High! with the grimness
of the semi-autobiographical Death in
Captivity). Perhaps the highest
tribute one can pay to Gilbert’s skill is that one never knows what one
is getting,
only that it will be well worth reading.
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These pages copyright Nicholas Lester Fuller, 2000--2010. Created 5th December 2004.
