Close Quarters (Gilbert)

"Educated at Blundell’s, a well-known private school, and London University, Gilbert had a short spell as a schoolteacher before the Second World War.... By then his enthusiasm for detective fiction had prompted him to start work on Close Quarters... conceived in the spirit of Golden Age mystery writing.

"[3] Golden Age mysteries had been popularized throughout the 1930s by writers such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Michael Innes and had informally created a number of conventions that are to be found in Close Quarters.

And finally, of course, Inspector Hazlerigg deduces the identity of the murderer, contrives to trick him into an incriminating act, and then explains all of the story's most baffling events to a gathering of the surviving characters.

A much later appraisal comes from Barzun and Taylor's encyclopedic Catalogue of Crime: One of the good stories of murder in godly surroundings, it was the author's first attempt at detection, written while he was a schoolmaster at Salisbury.

He now considers the tale cluttered, but the plan showing who was where in the close of Melchester Cathedral on the critical evening makes clear the theories of the official and unofficial detectives: Chief Inspector Hazlerigg and the dean's nephew.