Successful as an author of popular adventure and romance fiction, Baroness Orczy also wrote elaborately plotted detective tales. Orczy's Old Man in the Corner stories develop a brilliant, eccentric, and unlikely armchair detective, a disagreeable raconteur who helps a young woman journalist unravel obscure crimes. Orczy's Lady Molly of Scotland Yard tales feature one of the first fictional woman detectives.

Emma Madgalena Rosalia Maria Josefa Barbara Orczy was born into the Hungarian landed aristocracy in Tarna-Örs, Hungary, on 23 September 1865. She was named Emma (or Emmuska) after her mother, Countess Wass. Her father, Baron Felix Orczy, a gifted amateur composer who was friends with Liszt, Wagner, Gounod, and Massenet, was forced to leave Hungary because of an 1868 peasant uprising against his agricultural innovations. The family moved to Budapest, to Brussels, to Paris, and finally to London.

Orczy was educated at schools in Brussels and Paris, where she...