By 1932, when she produced her first crime novel, Withering Fires, under the pen name Marjorie Bowen, Gabrielle Margaret Vere Campbell had been writing histories, biographies, and historical novels under that pseudonym for more than twenty-five years. She had also published novels as Robert Paye and as George Preedy, and in 1932 she employed a fourth pen name: John Winch. That same year she adopted the pseudonym under which she is best known as a crime writer: Joseph Shearing (though she sometimes published her crime fiction as Bowen or Preedy). In the course of her long career she also wrote children's stories (as Bowen) and plays (most successfully as Preedy). Campbell once explained that, when she used a new pseudonym, it helped her to assume a new personality as a writer. She also realized that critics tended to be unkind to prolific writers. Because she earned her living by writing...