Fear to Tread

(CC) Photo: Jerry Bauer
Michael Gilbert on the back cover of Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens, 1982

Fear to Tread is a mystery–crime thriller by the British mystery writer Michael Gilbert, first published in 1953 by Hodder & Stoughton in England and by Harper & Row in the United States. Set mostly in London, it was his seventh novel in six years and built upon the favorable reputation he had achieved earlier with the well-received Smallbone Deceased and Death Has Deep Roots. Its main character is Wilfred Wetherall, a middle-aged, mild-mannered headmaster of "an understaffed, overpopulated secondary school for boys in the south-east of London." To further emphasize the apparently unheroic nature of the protagonist, throughout the book the third-person, omniscient narrator refers to him as "Mr. Wetherall".

In a long, admiring ''New York Times'' article about Gilbert by the mystery writer Amanda Cross she writes that:

His heroes fight without hope of reward, because they hate bullying; they honor, albeit with regret, the slow processes of democracy and law; they are loyal to those who have fought at their side, and they do not think trust a mug's game. In short, his characters embody the virtues of the class-ridden but romantic public school tradition.

Chief Superintendent Hazlerigg plays an important role in the book but does not appear until page 154 of the 223-page British edition.

http://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/12/books/who-did-it-michael-gilbert-and-p-d-james.html?pagewanted=2

See also

• Crime fiction/Catalog of prominent writers