Anything for a Quiet Life (short stories)

Upon publication, Kirkus Reviews found it to be:

A charming collection of nine stories.... None of these stories is particularly noteworthy for the mystery it presents, but, taken together, they offer a wry commentary on English-village attitudes toward gypsies, Londoners, foreigners, holidayers, tradesmen, country gentry, business partnerships, farmers, small-town nabobs, and the relative discomfort that exists between the police and members of the legal profession.... A companionable way to while away the time... and a clear pleasure for partisans of the cozy.[4]

Sybil Steinberg in Publishers Weekly said, "Though the characters may be two-dimensional and the stories of uneven quality, this collection, overall, delights by virtue of Gilbert's fanciful plotting."[5]

The stories feature the activities of a small law firm called Jonas Pickett, Solicitor and Commissioner for Oaths, recently started by Pickett, a man "on the wrong side of sixty".[6]

He was not, as he was fond of explaining to his friends, a retired solicitor. He was a retreating solicitor. Having made as much money as a bachelor of modest habits was likely to use in the rest of his lifetime, but not wishing to rust in idleness, he had abandoned a successful practice in north London and set up a modest office in Shackleton-on-Sea.[7]

There are three other main characters, his partner, Sabrina Mountjoy; their secretary, Claire Easterbrook; and a general handyman, Sam Conybeare, "a mountain of a man who had once performed remarkable feats of strength and daring in a circus." Pickett himself had played a role in an earlier Gilbert novel, The Long Journey Home. Confronted by arcane legal matters, Pickett consults Mountjoy: "She's a much better lawyer than I am."[8]

The stories are all told from the third person omniscient narrator perspective, sometimes with the members of Pickett's law firm playing fairly minor roles. They are written with Gilbert's usual straightforward, urbane, and somewhat detached tone but, as is usual in Gilbert's work, there is often a deceptively hard edge or even grimness to some of the stories. In Holy Writ, for instance, a deranged but nevertheless sympathetically portrayed parson is only narrowly prevented by Pickett and Sam Conybeare from killing his trusting young son in emulation of the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. In the final story, The Freedom Folk, an encampment of squatters refuses to heed a warning from Pickett and is carried away to the sea by a flash flood; the fairgrounds strongman, Conybeare, heroically manages to save six of them from the waters, but the other 70 are drowned. By the end of the last story, four years have passed since Pickett first opened his office, he has been elected to the local governing council, and he has retired from practice.

In the first story Mr. Calder, one of the two protagonists of Gilbert's Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens and Game without Rules, makes a brief appearance. In the same story, Pickett also meets a police superintendent named Queen, as well as a headmaster named Major Appleby. Inspector Queen was a character in many of the Ellery Queen mystery novels by Ellery Queen, and Inspector Appleby was the lead character in many novels by Michael Innes.

In the second story, there is a small role for Chief Superintendent Morrisey, head of the London District Regional Crime Squad, a character in a number of works by Gilbert.

• Anything for a Quiet Life, page 7 — Mr. Calder makes a brief appearance
• Black Bob, page 28
• Vivat Regina, page 50
• The Reign of Terror, page 73
• The Admiral, page 99
• We've Come to Report a Murder, Sir, page 122
• Holy Writ, page 147
• The Bird of Dawning, page 171
• The Freedom Folk, page 197

This article incorporates material from the Citizendium article "Anything for a Quiet Life", which is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License but not under the GFDL.