Patricia Wentworth is the pseudonym of Dora Amy Elles. The daughter of a distinguished soldier, Lt. Gen. Sir Edmund Roche Elles, she was born in 1878 in Mussoorie, one of the favorite summer stations of the Indian army in the foothills of the Himalayas. At first she was educated privately but later attended Blackheath High School for Girls, a well-to-do day school located not far from the military establishments at Woolwich, London. She was first married to Lt. Col. George Dillon, who died in 1906, and then, in 1920, to Lt. Col. George Oliver Turnbull, by whom she had one daughter. Despite her growing reputation as a writer, she never courted fame, preferring a quiet existence devoted to such typical British middle-class pleasures as the theater, gardening, motoring, and the keeping of pet dachshunds. Her second husband assisted her in the preparation of her manuscripts for submission to the publishers.

Wentworth's...