Hilda Lawrence (1894–1976)

Hilda Lawrence, née Hildegarde Kronmiller, was born in Baltimore, Maryland. She was educated in Rochester, New York, where she married and later divorced playwright Reginald Lawrence. She worked as a reader for the blind and in the clippings department of Macmillan Publishers. An avid consumer of crime fiction, she published her debut novel, Blood Upon the Snow, in 1944. The book was a commercial success and introduced Manhattan private eye Mark East, who gets assistance from amateur New England sleuths Miss Beulah Pond and Miss Bessy Petty. She wrote only three more novels, A Time to Die (1945); Death of a Doll (1947), which is considered her masterpiece; and The Pavilion (1948). A collection of novelettes, Duet of Death, was issued in 1949. Lawrence's novels were a mixture of the hard-boiled and soft-boiled styles of detective fiction.