[1] Spain went to Roedean School (a family tradition) from 1931 to 1935, where she began wearing "mannish" clothes, and developed a clear and rich speaking voice that stood her in good stead in her eventual media career.

[1] The biographer Rachel Cooke described Spain's ten detective novels as "eccentric and outrageously camp", most notably Poison for Teacher (1949).

She invented as her sleuths a revue star called Miriam Birdseye and her friend, a Russian ballerina, Natasha Nevkorina.

[5] She later appeared as a panellist on BBC TV's record review programme Juke Box Jury[5] and the panel game What's My Line?.

[7] In the late 1930s Spain's love of sport led to her first love affair, with a tennis buff, the twenty-three-year-old Winifred "Bin" Sargeant, described by a biographer as "a golden-haired, blue-eyed, middle-class girl from West Hartlepool who drove a green sports car, had a fondness for gin and tonic, and whose proficiency at tennis was such that she had tried, more than once, to qualify for Wimbledon".

[1][5] She was cremated with Laurie at Golders Green Crematorium, London, and her ashes were put in the family grave in Horsley, Northumberland.

[1] Noël Coward summed up in his diary: "It is cruel that all that gaiety, intelligence and vitality should be snuffed out when so many bores and horrors are left living".