Marie Belloc Lowndes excelled in creating terrifying psychological studies. Her interest was in character, and she effectively centered her carefully constructed plots around the ethical dilemmas faced by very ordinary people. She followed crimes of the day, sometimes attending trials, and she found in real events the materials for some of her best fiction. The subtitle of a late novel, Lizzie Borden: A Study in Conjecture (1939), suggests her method. Her approaches to crime fact vary from the loose adaptation of situation to relatively accurate approximation of actual facts, although even here names, dates, and settings may be changed.

Marie Adelaide Belloc was born in London in the summer of 1868. Her brother, Hilaire, who would become a poet and novelist, was born in 1870. Their parents, Louis Belloc, a Frenchman with an Irish grandfather, and Bessie Rayner Parkes Belloc, an Englishwoman who was a direct descendant of Joseph Priestley, were...