Margaret Lane was born on June 23, l907, in Cheshire, England. She was educated at St. Stephen's College, Folkstone, and St. Hugh's College, Oxford. Following in the footsteps of her father, a newspaper editor, she took up a career in journalism, working in London and New York from 1928 to 1938.

In 1934 Lane married Bryan Wallace, the eldest son of Edgar Wallace, the flamboyant and popular British novelist. She soon began to write novels also.

Her first, Faith, Hope and No Chanty (1935), won the Prix Femina-Vie Heureuse. A second novel, At Last the Island (1937), followed shortly, after which she produced a careful and well-received biography of her eccentric father-in-law, Edgar Wallace: The Biography of a Phenomenon (1938). Her marriage to Bryan Wallace ended in divorce in 1939.

Biographies of eccentric British characters have formed a major part of Lane's writing career. Walk into My Parlour (1941) is a biography of...