Smallbone Deceased (The Best Mysteries of All Time)

289 pp. Smallbone Deceased is a British mystery novel by Michael Gilbert, first published in the United Kingdom in 1950 by Hodder and Stoughton and in the United States by Harper & Brothers. A practicing lawyer himself, Gilbert made the setting of the novel a London solicitor's office. It was Gilbert's fourth novel and, like his three earlier ones, features Chief Inspector Hazlerigg as the official investigator; it also has an unofficial detective who works closely with Hazlerigg, a newly qualified solicitor named Henry Bohun who has just been hired by the firm in which the murders occur. A parainsomniac (a person who needs only a very few hours of sleep per night), Bohun, whose name is pronounced Boon, makes this his only appearance in a Gilbert novel but goes on to be the protagonist of a number of short stories.