I'm reading an American book written in the 1930s, and tbe following exchange takes place:
“What became of her?”
“I took the liberty of sending her to a place where she could be quiet until morning.”
“You had a crust, doing that."
“Why?”
“Did you know there was a murder case here?”
A quick search turns up no results. Note that it might well be a typographical/OCR error in the Kindle version (there have been several in the book), but I'm curious as to whether ot is a real idiom.
Best Answer
According to J.E. Lighter, Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1993), crust in the relevant sense goes back at least to 1900:
The earliest instance that Lighter cites comes from an issue of Dialect Notes containing Eugene Babbitt, "College Words and Phrases" (1900), which further specifies that crust in the sense of "forwardness" was recorded at Brown University (in Providence, Rhode Island) and Wesleyan University (in Middletown, Connecticut) in 1900 or slightly before.
Recent instances of the expression in print seem to be quite rare—and I don't think I've ever heard anyone use the expression in real life. But I did find an instance of it in a fairly recent novel. From Charlotte Armstrong, Mischief (2012):
The historical setting for this novel is unclear from the chapters excerpted in Google Books, but I can't confidently say that it is supposed to be contemporary. Still, if people writing books are still using crust to mean effrontery it is certainly possible that some people in the real world are, too.