When her stockbroker father lost his job the family suffered financial hardship, and she took up shorthand typing to earn a living.
[4] She began writing poetry, and then, inspired by the play The Cat and the Canary by John Willard (1922),[5] she tried her hand at detective novels, using the name J. Kilmeny Keith.
Crook is a vulgar London lawyer totally (and deliberately) unlike the sophisticated detectives, such as Lord Peter Wimsey and Philo Vance, who dominated the mystery field when Gilbert introduced him.
Instead of dispassionately analysing a case, he usually enters it after seemingly damning evidence has built up against his client, then conducts a no-holds-barred investigation of doubtful ethics to clear him or her.
[8] "You'll Be the Death of Me," an October 1963 episode of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, was adapted from Gilbert's short story "The Goldfish Button" in the February 1958 Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine.