Helen Simpson was born in Sydney, Australia, on 1 December 1897 of French aristocratic stock (she made use of this background in her novel Boomerang, 1932). She left Australia before she was twenty years old and lived out her life in England, dying in the Blitz in 1940. Simpson was one of the earliest women undergraduates at Oxford, and her acquaintance with Dorothy Sayers and others led her to become a charter member of the Detection Club; she contributed to the group's Ask a Policeman in 1933. The range of work produced during her forty-two years is wide: plays, translations from the French, histories and biographies, even recipe books. Her claim on present interest, out of the dozen novels she wrote, are the five mystery or detective novels, three of which were written in collaboration with Clemence Dane.

Of the five novels within the mystery genre, the three written with Dane have attracted...