Frances Crane

Frances Kirkwood Crane (October 27, 1890 – November 6, 1981) was an American mystery author, who introduced private investigator Pat Abbott and his future wife Jean in her first novel, The Turquoise Shop (1941).

[1] Crane was born in Lawrenceville, Illinois, and hailed from a wealthy, well-educated family; most of her male relatives were doctors, and her aunt Nancy may have earned a master's degree, highly unusual for a woman of that time.

She spent an extended stay in Germany towards the end of the 1930s, but her liberal opinions and outspokenness soon put her at odds with the rising tide of Nazism; she was once reprimanded after thumbing her nose at a speech by Hitler being broadcast over loudspeakers, and on another occasion tried convincing the staff at an anti-Semitic restaurant that she was Jewish (her family were in fact descended from Scottish Presbyterians).

After leaving behind Nazi Germany, having been recently divorced and faced with mounting college bills from her only daughter, Nancy, Frances began formulating detective stories, upon realising that her old fiction – gentle satires of English culture – were going out of fashion among modern American readers, who were now supporting the British in World War II.

Nancy herself was a sculptor and also wrote articles of her own in the late 1940s; she was married to the pulp magazine writer Norbert Davis until his suicide, possibly as a result of his cancer diagnosis, and had one daughter, Diana Farris.