Gilbert Jones—Bloodhounds

Gilbert Jones—Bloodhounds is an antagonistic relationship formed when the club’s dismissal of Jones’s devotion to Ian Fleming became, for him, a lasting personal injury. Years later, he used Shirley-Ann Miller’s return to the group as a route back into its affairs, then designed a real locked-room crime to humiliate the people he believed had belittled him.

The original slight

Jones joined the Bloodhounds as Gilbert Jones, bringing his expertise in Ian Fleming’s work to a club devoted to discussing crime fiction. He lasted only a few weeks. The rejection, as he recounts it to Peter Diamond, was not simply a disagreement about taste: members called Fleming’s books blood-and-thunder thrillers and treated Jones’s interest as a waste of their time. Jones regarded their response as ignorant and remained convinced that Fleming’s research and attention to detail had transformed the spy story. He pointed to the books’ worldwide success and to admirers such as President Kennedy and Kingsley Amis as evidence that the club’s judgment was narrow.

Diamond proposes that the dispute also wounded Jones personally, since the members judged him by his manner and voice without knowing his occupation. Jones resists that account: in his view, the club had chosen to ignore him once they learned that he admired Fleming and no one else. Whatever the precise source of the humiliation, his answer makes clear that the episode remained alive for him. When Diamond asks whether he quit after three weeks, Jones says he should have left after one; when asked if he later forgot the club, he insists that he did not. The old grievance is therefore not a passing disappointment but the connection that gives the later crimes their personal target.

Shirley-Ann Miller as a point of return

Jones’s link to the Bloodhounds resumed through Shirley-Ann Miller, who moved in with him and, like him, read crime stories. She reads widely, and she joined the club. Her meetings gave Jones news of the people who had once snubbed him, including the fact that the same group was still running it. He says he was riveted by her account of the first meeting she attended, especially when the club agreed to discuss the locked-room puzzle.

There is a revealing discrepancy in Jones’s account of how Shirley-Ann came to join. He denies that he prompted her, while Diamond recalls that Shirley-Ann had said Jones brought home a Leisure Center brochure and pointed out the Bloodhounds because he knew how much she enjoyed detective stories. Diamond recognizes the lie but declines to pursue it, treating it as secondary to the crimes and judging that Shirley-Ann was not an accessory. Jones also insists that she knows nothing of his own brief earlier attendance. Her role in the relationship is thus double: she supplies the information that makes his revenge possible, but the evidence does not establish that she understands the history or participates in his plan.

Grievance turned into a locked-room challenge

Jones describes hearing Shirley-Ann’s reports as an opportunity to act against the Bloodhounds. Diamond frames his motive as a desire to show up the members’ “tiny minds”; Jones accepts the aim of showing them up, but rejects the suggestion that he was having fun. His seriousness matters: what could look like an elaborate game to a detective-fiction club was, for Jones, revenge for an injury he had preserved for years. He says he was especially prompted by learning that the same people were still in charge.

The form of that revenge was deliberately matched to the club’s interests. After the Bloodhounds chose to discuss a locked-room puzzle, Jones decided to confront them with a real one, proving, as Diamond puts it, that a reader of James Bond could frame the group through one of its favored plots. Jones agrees with this description in broad terms, though Diamond observes that the irony of turning a fictional puzzle into actual crime seems to escape him. The intellectual challenge and the personal attack are inseparable: the club’s chosen subject becomes the instrument for making its members feel the limits of their own expertise.

The crime and the relationship’s significance

Diamond connects the grievance to the theft of the Penny Black. He reconstructs Jones’s plan as an early-morning entry at the museum while window cleaners were working outside: Jones could use a ladder and bucket without arousing suspicion because he regularly went jogging in the mornings. Diamond further infers that Jones had visited beforehand to find a weakness in the security. This account ties the theft to the same calculated performance as the locked-room challenge, although the exchange presented here ends with Diamond asking whether his reconstruction is fair.

The relationship’s defining contrast is between the club’s discussion of fictional ingenuity and Jones’s decision to make that ingenuity criminally consequential. The Bloodhounds had once dismissed the books and expertise he valued; he later used their interest in puzzles to expose them to a case designed around their own assumptions. Shirley-Ann’s reports bridge those two periods, carrying him information without, as far as Diamond believes, making her complicit. What began as a short-lived membership thus persists as an unresolved contest: Jones does not seek reconciliation or renewed acceptance, but the recognition he believes the club denied him.