A prolific journalist who wrote for some of the leading periodicals of his day, Angus Reach turned his hand as well to several other genres, including the mystery novel. His romance Clement Lorimer (1849) is illustrative of the difficulties mystery writers faced before the rise of the detective in British fiction.

Born in Inverness, Angus Bethune Reach was educated at the Inverness Royal Academy and Edinburgh University, where he began his journalistic career by writing articles for the Inverness Courier. At the age of twenty-one he went to London to help his father scratch out a living for them. His father, Roderick Reach, a solicitor and onetime proprietor of the Inverness Courier, had encountered financial difficulties and later became the London correspondent for the newspaper he had once run, a position that the son assumed on his father's death in 1853.

With the help of Charles Mackay, a Scottish poet...