The Scarlet Button

Dust Jacket blurb:
More excitement, suspense and action in packed into this new mystery than any preceding book by Anthony Gilbert

James Chigwell was a blackmailer, a human spider who fattened on the blood of other men, on their misfortunes, on their mistakes. But retribution came to Chigwell. One of his victims at last rebelled against his devilish iniquity and bludgeoned him to death. But who among Chigwell's many victims had, with the final courage of despair, summoned up the resolution to slay his tormentor?

The Scarlet Button or Murder Is Cheap begins like an inverted novel. Kenneth Jardine, a nerve-ridden young pilot, visits the spider-like blackmailer James Chigwell; we leap over an asterisk; Chigwell is dead, his brains battered in. But did Kenneth kill him? He conceals his visit; he has blood on his coat and on his stick. But, the police soon arrest Rupert Burke, a civil servant, who was another of Chigwell’s victims, but release him when Kenneth steps forward to clear him. When Kenneth is arrested, his barmaid friend, Bess Carter, calls in lawyer Arthur Crook.

Bess Carter was a golden haired, well rounded barmaid...and no lady. She went to Crook for help because she wouldn't believe the man she loved was a killer--even when she saw the tell-tale crimson splotches on his shirt...or when she found the heavy stick he carried, crusted with a dead man's blood.

This novel is at once grim and entertaining, a excellent and unusual detective mystery, featuring, of course, the celebrated lawyer/detective, Arthur Crook.