Anthony Gilbert is the best-known pseudonym of Lucy Beatrice Malleson, who wrote twenty-four books as Anne Meredith, two books as J. Kilmeny Keith, four as Sylvia Denys Hooke, and two as Lucy Egerton. As Anthony Gilbert she wrote more than sixty crime novels, most of them featuring Arthur Crook, a coarse but lovable lawyer with a particular concern for the weak and helpless, who spends more time detecting than practicing law.

Malleson was born 15 February 1899 in Upper Norwood, a suburb south of London. She attended St. Paul's Girls' School in Hammersmith, London, which she left at age fifteen when she did not receive a scholarship and her family could not afford the tuition. In her autobiography, Three-a-Penny (1940), she complains of the irrelevance of her education: a chauvinistic concentration on English literature and English history, and mathematics which included logarithms but left students unable to do accounts. The year...