Molly Thynne

Mary Harriet Thynne, who wrote as Molly Thynne, was born in 1881 and came from an old aristocratic family. She grew up in Kensington, was related on her mother's side to the painter James McNeill Whistler, and seems to have moved in unusually literary circles from an early age.

She published her first novel, The Uncertain Glory, in 1914, but is best remembered for the detective fiction she wrote between the late 1920s and early 1930s. Several of those books feature Dr. Constantine, a chess master and amateur sleuth, and her work is now often grouped with the classic British crime fiction of the interwar years.

Thynne never married and spent much of her life in Bovey Tracey, Devon. She died in 1950, and her books have since been rediscovered by modern publishers and readers with a taste for forgotten Golden Age mysteries.