Isabel Ostrander

Born in New York City in 1883, Isabel Ostrander wrote mystery and adventure fiction during the boom years of pulp magazines and popular detective stories. She published under her own name as well as the pseudonyms Robert Orr Chipperfield, David Fox, and Douglas Grant, building a wide-ranging body of work for magazine readers and book audiences alike.

She is especially remembered for her detective fiction, including stories featuring characters such as Damon Gaunt, Thornley Colton, and the detective pair McCarty and Riordan. Modern readers of crime fiction may also find her notable because she is sometimes mentioned in discussions of the earliest blind detectives in mystery writing, and because Agatha Christie later parodied her work in Partners in Crime.

Ostrander died of heart disease in Long Beach, New York, on April 26, 1924. Though she is less widely read today than some of her contemporaries, her fiction remains part of the lively world of early American popular suspense and detective writing.