149:, 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.
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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
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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
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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
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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,
76:. In spite of Gilbert's usual low-key urbanity in his style, a number of them have an unexpected grimness about them. "Michael was an exceptionally fine storyteller, but he's hard to classify," said one of his British publishers after his death. "He's not a
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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.
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141:, 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
164:, 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
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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".
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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."
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writer in the classic sense, but there is a hard edge to him, a feeling within his work that not all of society is rational, that virtue is not always rewarded.".
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Steinberg, Sybil (February 23, 1990). "Anything for a Quiet Life". Vol. 237, no. 8.
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62:'s Lifetime Achievement Award. All nine stories had previously appeared in
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named him a Grand Master in 1988 and in 1990 he was presented
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Creative
Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
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is a collection of nine short stories by the
British writer
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London and set up a modest office in
Shackleton-on-Sea.
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Anything for a Quiet Life and Other New
Mystery Stories
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183:In the second story, there is a small role for
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50:in 1980, was a founder-member of the
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231:We've Come to Report a Murder, Sir
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305:on 25 September 2007
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243:The Bird of Dawning
219:The Reign of Terror
152:In the first story
134:omniscient narrator
101:Sybil Steinberg in
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325:The New York Times
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237:Holy Writ
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