Let’s be honest: if you’re hiding bodies in deed boxes, your firm probably needs a new filing system. Smallbone Deceased, Michael Gilbert’s polished 1950 mystery, opens with this exact logistical and ethical dilemma. Set in a postwar London solicitor’s office where the secrets are thick and the tea is thicker, the novel is a marvelous cocktail of legal procedural, stiff upper lips, and casual homicide. It’s what would happen if Agatha Christie went to law school, skipped the gin, and started worrying about trust fund embezzlement. It earns four stars—because while it’s clever and classy, it also occasionally wears its respectability like a monocle it refuses to admit needs cleaning.
Michael Gilbert was a solicitor by trade and a crime writer by reputation, and Smallbone Deceased is where the two finally met for tea. This was his fourth novel, and like a good barrister, it came fully briefed: tight plotting, realistic legal milieu, and just enough of a body count to raise eyebrows without triggering a panic at The Times. Published by Hodder and Stoughton in the UK and Harper & Brothers in the US, the novel introduced readers to a postwar legal world trying very hard to return to normal—despite the odd corpse turning up in the records department.
Unlike some of its Golden Age predecessors, Smallbone trades in country manors for client lists, and drawing rooms for law offices. It’s a pivot that feels deliberate. Gilbert wasn’t trying to out-Poirot Poirot—he was taking the whodunit off the croquet lawn and putting it on the solicitor’s desk. And he does it with precision, crafting a professional setting so believable you’ll start checking your own office for corpses.
On the surface, the novel is a clever murder mystery. Beneath that surface? A quiet, pointed study in loyalty, institutional rot, and postwar fatigue. These characters aren’t plotting global conspiracies—they’re just trying to keep the lights on without getting indicted. Miss Cornel, the seemingly harmless long-serving secretary, turns out to be the killer—but not out of greed or madness. No, she murders in service of a legacy. Because in this world, the line between loyalty and complicity isn’t just blurred—it’s practically gone full Jackson Pollock.
The deeper irony is that the firm isn’t a criminal enterprise—it’s just… ethically flexible. Which may be worse. Gilbert’s legal background lends the novel a kind of bureaucratic pathos: everyone’s doing their job, upholding the firm’s “reputation,” and occasionally burying a body in a deed box. It’s not evil, exactly. It’s just what happens when decency becomes a checkbox on a client intake form.
Michael Gilbert knew his way around a courtroom, but he also knew that fiction allowed you to prosecute the guilty in ways that cross-examination never could. His prose is lean, dryly witty, and never self-indulgent. You won’t find florid descriptions or overwrought inner monologues here—just crisp dialogue, subtle characterization, and plot mechanics smoother than a silk tie on a tax attorney.
And then there’s Henry Bohun, the parainsomniac junior solicitor who functions on two hours of sleep and a bottomless supply of curiosity. He’s the novel’s secret weapon: a low-key Holmes with the energy of a golden retriever and the instincts of a bloodhound. It’s a clever narrative device—give your amateur sleuth more time to think than everyone else, and the murders practically solve themselves.
Upon release, Smallbone Deceased was met with polite but consistent applause—think standing ovation, but with everyone still sitting. Critics praised its realism, its elegance, and its refusal to pander. It quickly earned a place on “Top 100 Crime Novels” lists and has been described as Gilbert’s magnum opus—though, to be fair, that’s like calling a very good barrister the least boring person at the probate hearing.
Later crime fiction writers have cited it as a turning point—when the genteel mystery finally shook hands with the modern workplace. Martin Edwards and the British Crime Writers’ Association have sung its praises, and Jacques Barzun called it a “masterwork,” which is about as effusive as Barzun ever got unless he was insulting someone. The novel remains in print, not just because it’s good, but because it still feels smart and slyly relevant.
If you like your mysteries sharp, your dialogue British, and your corpses conveniently stored, Smallbone Deceased is the book for you. It’s a whodunit for people who’ve spent too long in meetings, who suspect their bosses of minor war crimes, and who find something perversely comforting about a story where the legal profession is both the setting and the crime scene. Four stars—because even if the characters rarely raise their voices, Gilbert makes sure the stakes are loud and clear.
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