Arthur George Morrison (1863-1945) was an English author and journalist, known for his realistic novels about London's East End and for his detective stories. In 1890, he left his job as a clerk at th…
Henry James was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in…
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American-British novelist and screenwriter. In 1932, at the age of forty-four, Chandler became a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company execut…
Sir Terence David John Pratchett was an English author, humorist, and satirist, best known for the Discworld series of 41 comic fantasy novels published between 1983–2015, and for the apocalyptic come…
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was a Scottish writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for A Study in Scarlet, the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about…
James Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and a pivotal figure in 20th-century modernist literature, renowned for his highly experimental approach to language and narrative structure, particularly his …
Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE, was a comic writer who enjoyed enormous popular success during a career of more than seventy years and continues to be widely read over 40 years after his death. D…
Shirley Jackson was an influential American author. A popular writer in her time, her work has received increasing attention from literary critics in recent years. She has influenced such writers as S…
Anthony Trollope became one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of Trollope's best-loved works, known as the Chronicles of Barsetshire, revolve …
Martin Edwards has been described by Richard Osman as ‘a true master of British crime writing.’ He has published twenty-three novels, which include the eight Lake District Mysteries, one of which was …
Rex Todhunter Stout (1886–1975) was an American crime writer, best known as the creator of the larger-than-life fictional detective Nero Wolfe, described by reviewer Will Cuppy as "that Falstaff of de…
Josephine Tey was a pseudonym of Elizabeth Mackintosh. Josephine was her mother's first name and Tey the surname of an English Grandmother. As Josephine Tey, she wrote six mystery novels featuring Sco…
Cesare Pavese was born in a small town in which his father, an official, owned property. He attended school and later, university, in Turin. Denied an outlet for his creative powers by Fascist control…
Marlen Haushofer was born in Frauenstein, Molln, Austria on April the 11th, 1920. She went to a Catholic gymnasium that was turned in a public school under the Nazi regime. She started her studies on …
Andrew Miller was born in Bristol in 1960. He has lived in Spain, Japan, Ireland and France, and currently lives in Somerset. His first novel, INGENIOUS PAIN, was published by Sceptre in 1997 and won …
Catherine Louisa Pirkis (6 October 1839 – 4 October 1910) was a British author of detective fiction. Throughout her career as a writer, Pirkis would sometimes write under the name of "C.L. Pirkis", as…
Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812-1870) was a writer and social critic who created some of the world's best-known fictional characters and is regarded as the greatest novelist of the Victorian era. Hi…
Mrs. L.T. Meade (Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Toulmin Smith), was a prolific children's author of Anglo Irish extraction. Born in 1844, Meade was the eldest daughter of a Protestant clergyman, whose chur…
William Somerset Maugham was born in Paris in 1874. He spoke French even before he spoke a word of English, a fact to which some critics attribute the purity of his style.
Guy Newell Boothby was born in Adelaide, South Australia, the son of Thomas Wilde Boothby, a Member of the South Australian House of Assembly. At six years of age he travelled with his mother to Engla…