Lee Thayer

Born Emma Redington Lee in Troy, Pennsylvania, Lee Thayer studied at Cooper Union and Pratt Institute in New York. She worked as an artist and decorator, and with her husband, artist Henry W. Thayer, was involved in the Decorative Designers firm before becoming known to readers as a novelist.

She published her first mystery novel, The Mystery of the Thirteenth Floor, in 1919 and went on to write around sixty mystery novels over the course of a remarkably long career. Most of them feature the red-haired detective Peter Clancy and his valet, Wiggar, a duo that helped make her a familiar name to fans of early 20th-century detective fiction.

Thayer kept writing into her nineties, with her final novel appearing in 1966. She died in Coronado, California, on November 18, 1973, leaving behind a substantial body of clever, fast-moving mysteries.