Dorothy Erskine Muir

Dorothy Agnes Sheepshanks (1889-1977) was one of seventeen children of John Sheepshanks, Bishop of Norwich. She attended Oxford, worked as an academic tutor, and began writing professionally to supplement the family income after the unexpected death of her husband, in 1932.

Dorothy worked for Oxford University & became an outside specialist tutor to whom colleges might refer undergraduates. According to family sources, Machiavelli and His Times was written with the Political Thought and Renaissance Special Subject papers of the Oxford History School in mind.

Under the moniker, D. Erskine Muir, Dorothy wrote three accomplished detective novels: In Muffled Night. (1933), Five to Five (1934) and In Memory of Charles (1941).

If you like author Dorothy Erskine Muir here is the list of authors you may also like

Buy books on Amazon

Total similar authors (23)

Christopher St. John Sprigg

Christopher St. John Sprigg aka Christopher Caudwell was a British Marxist writer, thinker and poet.

He was born into a Roman Catholic family, resident at 53 Montserrat Road, Putney. He was educated at the Benedictine Ealing Priory School, but left school at the age of 15 after his father, Stanhope Sprigg, lost his job as literary editor of the Daily Express. Caudwell moved with his father to Bradford and began work as a reporter for the Yorkshire Observer. He made his way to Marxism and set about rethinking everything in light of it, from poetry to philosophy to physics, later joining the Communist Party of Great Britain in Poplar, London.

In December 1936 he drove an ambulance to Spain and joined the International Brigades there, training a
Buy books on Amazon
Moray Dalton

Pseudonym of Katherine Mary Deville Dalton Renoir (1881-1963)

Katherine Dalton was born in Hammersmith, London in 1881, the only child of a Canadian father and English mother. The author wrote two well-received early novels, Olive in Italy (1909), and The Sword of Love (1920). However, her career in crime fiction did not begin until 1924, after which Moray Dalton published twenty-nine mysteries, the last in 1951. The majority of these feature her recurring sleuths, Scotland Yard inspector Hugh Collier and private inquiry agent Hermann Glide. Moray Dalton married Louis Jean Renoir in 1921, and the couple had a son a year later. The author lived on the south coast of England for the majority of her life following the marriage. She died in Wort
Buy books on Amazon
Anne Tyler

Anne Tyler was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 1941 and grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina. She graduated at nineteen from Duke University and went on to do graduate work in Russian studies at Columbia University. She has published 20 novels, her debut novel being If Morning Ever Comes in (1964). Her eleventh novel, Breathing Lessons , was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Buy books on Amazon
Martin Edwards

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 shortlisted for the Theakston’s Prize for best crime novel of the year and four books featuring Rachel Savernake, including the Dagger-nominated Gallows Court and Blackstone Fell, while Gallows Court and Sepulchre Street were shortlisted for the eDunnit award for best crime novel of the year. He is also the author of two multi-award-winning histories of crime fiction, The Life of Crime and The Golden Age of Murder. He has received three Daggers from the Crime Writers’ Association and two Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America and has also b
Buy books on Amazon
Anthony Horowitz

Anthony Horowitz, OBE is ranked alongside Enid Blyton and Mark A. Cooper as "The most original and best spy-kids authors of the century." (New York Times). Anthony has been writing since the age of eight, and professionally since the age of twenty. In addition to the highly successful Alex Rider books, he is also the writer and creator of award winning detective series Foyle’s War, and more recently event drama Collision, among his other television works he has written episodes for Poirot, Murder in Mind, Midsomer Murders and Murder Most Horrid. Anthony became patron to East Anglia Children’s Hospices in 2009.

On 19 January 2011, the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle announced that Horowitz was to be the writer of a new Sherlock Holmes novel, th
Buy books on Amazon
Ian Rankin

AKA Jack Harvey.

Born in the Kingdom of Fife in 1960, Ian Rankin graduated from the University of Edinburgh in 1982 and then spent three years writing novels when he was supposed to be working towards a PhD in Scottish Literature. His first Rebus novel was published in 1987; the Rebus books are now translated into 22 languages and are bestsellers on several continents.

Ian Rankin has been elected a Hawthornden Fellow. He is also a past winner of the Chandler-Fulbright Award, and he received two Dagger Awards for the year's best short story and the Gold Dagger for Fiction. Ian Rankin is also the recipient of honorary degrees from the universities of Abertay, St Andrews, and Edinburgh.

A contributor to BBC2's Newsnight Review, he also presented
Buy books on Amazon
Rennie Airth

Rennie Airth was born in South Africa and has worked as a foreign correspondent for Reuters. The first novel in his John Madden trilogy, River of Darkness, was published in 1999 to huge critical acclaim, was shortlisted for four crime fiction awards and won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France. The sensational sequel was The Blood-Dimmed Tide, and The Dead of Winter forms the final part of the trilogy.

Currently resides in Italy.
Buy books on Amazon
Ann Cleeves

Ann is the author of the books behind ITV's VERA, now in it's third series, and the BBC's SHETLAND, which will be aired in December 2012. Ann's DI Vera Stanhope series of books is set in Northumberland and features the well loved detective along with her partner Joe Ashworth. Ann's Shetland series bring us DI Jimmy Perez, investigating in the mysterious, dark, and beautiful Shetland Islands...

Ann grew up in the country, first in Herefordshire, then in North Devon. Her father was a village school teacher. After dropping out of university she took a number of temporary jobs - child care officer, women's refuge leader, bird observatory cook, auxiliary coastguard - before going back to college and training to be a probation officer.

While she wa
Buy books on Amazon
Sara Woods

(Lana Hutton Bowen-Judd)
UK (1922 - 1986)
aka Anne Burton, Mary Challis, Margaret Leek

Born in England, she was educated at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Filey, Yorkshire.

During the Second World War, she worked in a bank and as a solicitor's clerk in London. Here she gained much of the information later used in her novels. Lana married Anthony George Bowen-Judd on April 25, 1946. They ran a pig breeding farm between 1948 and 1954. In 1957 they moved to Nova Scotia, Canada. She worked as a registrar for St. Mary's University until 1964. In 1961 she wrote her first novel, Bloody Instructions, introducing the hero of forty-nine of her mysteries, Anthony Maitland, an English barrister.

Her last years she lived with her husband at Niagara-on-th
Buy books on Amazon
Patricia Wentworth

Patricia Wentworth--born Dora Amy Elles--was a British crime fiction writer.

She was educated privately and at Blackheath High School in London. After the death of her first husband, George F. Dillon, in 1906, she settled in Camberley, Surrey. She married George Oliver Turnbull in 1920 and they had one daughter.

She wrote a series of 32 classic-style whodunnits featuring Miss Silver, the first of which was published in 1928, and the last in 1961, the year of her death.

Miss Silver, a retired governess-turned private detective, is sometimes compared to Jane Marple, the elderly detective created by Agatha Christie. She works closely with Scotland Yard, especially Inspector Frank Abbott and is fond of quoting the poet Tennyson.

Wentworth also wr
Buy books on Amazon
Charlotte MacLeod

Naturalized US Citizen

Also wrote as Alisa Craig

Charlotte MacLeod, born in New Brunswick, Canada, and a naturalized U.S. citizen, was the multi-award-winning author of over thirty acclaimed novels. Her series featuring detective Professor Peter Shandy, America's homegrown Hercule Poirot, delivers "generous dollops of...warmth, wit, and whimsy" (San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle). But fully a dozen novels star her popular husband-and-wife team of Sarah Kelling and Max Bittersohn. And her native Canada provides a backdrop for the amusing Grub-and-Stakers cozies written under the pseudonym Alisa Craig and the almost-police procedurals starring Madoc Rhys, RCMP. A cofounder and past president of the American Crime Writers League, she a
Buy books on Amazon
Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie also wrote romance novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott, and was occasionally published under the name Agatha Christie Mallowan.

Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, DBE (née Miller) was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world's longest-running play, the murder mystery The Mousetrap, which has been performed in the West End of London since 1952. A writer during the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction", Christie has been called the "Queen of Crime". She also wrote six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. In 1971, she was made a Dame (DBE) by Queen
Buy books on Amazon
Susie Dent

Dent was educated at the Marist Convent in Ascot, an independent Roman Catholic day school. She went on to Somerville College, Oxford for her B.A. in modern languages, then to Princeton University for her master's degree in German.

Dent is serves as the resident lexicographer and adjudicator for the letters rounds on long-running British game show Countdown. At the time she began work on Countdown in 1992, she had just started working for the Oxford University Press on producing English dictionaries, having previously worked on bilingual dictionaries.
Buy books on Amazon
Freeman Wills Crofts

Born in Dublin of English stock, Freeman Wills Crofts was educated at Methodist and Campbell Colleges in Belfast and at age 17 he became a civil engineering pupil, apprenticed to his uncle, Berkeley D Wise who was the chief engineer of the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway (BNCR).

In 1899 he became a fully fledged railway engineer before becoming a district engineer and then chief assistant engineer for the BNCR.

He married in 1912, Mary Bellas Canning, a bank manager's daughter. His writing career began when he was recovering from a serious illness and his efforts were rewarded when his first novel 'The Cask' was accepted for publication by a London publishing house. Within two decades the book had sold 100,000 copies. Thereafter he con
Buy books on Amazon
George Bellairs

AKA Hilary Landon
George Bellairs is the nom de plume of Harold Blundell, a crime writer and bank manager born in Heywood, near Rochdale, Lancashire, who settled in the Isle of Man on retirement. He wrote more than 50 books, most featuring the series' detective Inspector Littlejohn. He also wrote four novels under the alternative pseudonym Hilary Landon.
Buy books on Amazon
E.C.R. Lorac

Edith Caroline Rivett (who wrote under the pseudonyms E.C.R. Lorac, Carol Carnac, Carol Rivett, and Mary le Bourne) was a British crime writer. She was born in Hendon, Middlesex (now London). She attended the South Hampstead High School, and the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London.

She was a member of the Detection Club. She was a very prolific writer, having written forty-eight mysteries under her first pen name, and twenty-three under her second. She was an important author of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.
Buy books on Amazon
Bruce Graeme

Graham Montague Jeffries aka David Graeme, Peter Bourne, Roderic Hastings, Fielding Hope, and Jeffrey Montague father of Roderic Jeffries

He is the creator of:
1. ‘Blackshirt (Richard Verrell)’, a gentleman crook.
2. ‘Auguste Jantry’, an Inspector in 19th century Paris.
3. ‘Robert Mather’, a Detective Sergeant.
4. ‘William Stevens and Pierre Allain’, a Detective Superintendent and an Inspector.
5. ‘Theodore I. Terhune’, a bookseller and amateur sleuth.
6. ‘Lord Blackshirt (Anthony Verrell)’, a gentleman crook and son of Richard Verrell.
In 1952 his son Roderic Jeffries started writing Blackshirt stories under the pseudonym ‘Roderic Graeme’.
Buy books on Amazon
Mary Fitt

"Mary Fitt" was the pen-name used for her crime novels by Dr. Kathleen Freeman, who for several years was Lecturer in Greek at the University of Wales at Cardiff.
Buy books on Amazon
Carol Carnac

Edith Caroline Rivett (who wrote under the pseudonyms E.C.R. Lorac, Carol Carnac, Carol Rivett, and Mary le Bourne) was a British crime writer. She was born in Hendon, Middlesex (now London). She attended the South Hampstead High School, and the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London.

She was a member of the Detection Club. She was a very prolific writer, having written forty-eight mysteries under her first pen name, and twenty-three under her second. She was an important author of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.
Buy books on Amazon
Moray Dalton

Pseudonym of Katherine Mary Deville Dalton Renoir (1881-1963)

Katherine Dalton was born in Hammersmith, London in 1881, the only child of a Canadian father and English mother. The author wrote two well-received early novels, Olive in Italy (1909), and The Sword of Love (1920). However, her career in crime fiction did not begin until 1924, after which Moray Dalton published twenty-nine mysteries, the last in 1951. The majority of these feature her recurring sleuths, Scotland Yard inspector Hugh Collier and private inquiry agent Hermann Glide. Moray Dalton married Louis Jean Renoir in 1921, and the couple had a son a year later. The author lived on the south coast of England for the majority of her life following the marriage. She died in Wort
Buy books on Amazon
John Bude

John Bude was a pseudonym used by Ernest Carpenter Elmore who was a British born writer.

He was born in 1901 and, as a boarder, he attended Mill Hill School, leaving in 1919 and moving on to Cheltenham where he attended a secretarial college and where he learned to type. After that he spent several years as games master at St Christopher School in Letchworth where he also led the school's dramatic activities.

This keen interest in the theatre led him to join the Lena Ashwell Players as stage manager and he took their productions around the country. He also acted in plays produced at the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead, where he lived for a time. He honed his writing skills, whenever he had a moment to spare, in the various dressing rooms that
Buy books on Amazon
Judi Daykin

Yorkshire born, Judi has lived, worked and made theatre in Norfolk for the last forty years. She completed her MA in Creative Writing (Crime Fiction) at the University of East Anglia (UEA), and her debut novel was shortlisted for the Little, Brown UEA writer's prize in 2019.

'I love the beautiful, vast skies and watery landscapes of Norfolk. Our home in a village on the north coast can feel wonderfully remote, even though the nearest town is only a few miles away. I can't imagine living anywhere better than this.'

Judi is also a working actor, and has been known to twiddle the knobs on the sound desk for the variety shows at Cromer Pier. She runs her own theatre company, Broad Horizons, specialising in commissioning new plays recovering and r
Buy books on Amazon
Bonnie Burke-Patel

Born and raised in South Gloucestershire, Bonnie Burke-Patel studied History at Oxford. After working for half a decade in politics and policy, she changed careers and became a preschool teacher, before beginning to write full time. She lives with her husband, son, and needy cat in south east London, and is working on her next crime novel about fairy tales, desire, and the seaside.
Buy books on Amazon