Her maternal grandparents where the Irish-German couple Max Henry and Bertha Ferrars, who had taken residence in Freiburg, southern Germany, after having lived and worked in Burma for many years until 1896.
Unable to study English Literature, because she was never taught Latin or Greek, she took a diploma in journalism at London University (1925–1928),[3] and wrote two first novels under her own name in the early 1930s.
It was at this time that she met and married her first husband, Alan G. Staniland, who had a keen interest in contemporary literature, owned a first edition of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and was a talented amateur water colorist.
[5] Around 1940, she met a lecturer in Botany at Bedford College, Dr (later Professor) Robert Brown,[6] and the same year her first crime novel, Give a Corpse a Bad Name, was published.
Notwithstanding the financial attraction of such a posting in austerity postwar Britain, they returned a year later owing to the atmosphere of McCarthyism.
Citing the long, cold winters as a reason, they then moved south to the village of Blewbury in Oxfordshire, where they lived until her sudden death in 1995.
Late in her career, she began writing about a semi-estranged married couple, Virginia and Felix Freer, and a retired botanist, Andrew Basnett.
She travelled with her husband when his academic career required, for example to Adelaide where he was a visiting professor at the University of South Australia, and on holidays, especially to Madeira, which they loved.