Dorothy Bowers (1902–1948)

Dorothy Bowers was born in Herefordshire, England, the daughter of a bakery owner, and raised and educated just over the border in Monmouth, Wales. She attended the Monmouth School for Girls and went on to Oxford University, where she read modern history. She later said these years were among the happiest of her life, and she greatly missed the friends she made there. After graduation, she returned to Monmouth to work as a history teacher, but finding full-time employment was difficult. She tutored private students and held a temporary position teaching history, English, and elocution at a school in Malvern. She supplemented her income by compiling crossword puzzles for John O’London Weekly from 1936 to 1943 and for Country Life from 1940 to 1946. However, she had hopes of a literary career, and published her first detective novel, Postscript to Poison, in 1938. It received enthusiastic reviews and established her as among the best writers in the genre of literary thrillers. Fear and Miss Betony (1941), now considered her masterpiece, was hailed by the Times of London as the best mystery of the year. After the outbreak of World War II, she moved to London and worked for the European News Service of the BBC. Her fifth and final book, The Bells at Old Bailey, was published in 1947. Dorothy Bowers died at age 46 of tuberculosis the following year. She had just been inducted into the prestigious Detection Club, the society of Golden Age mystery writers that included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and G.K. Chesterton.