Georgette Heyer (/ˈheɪ.ər/; 16 August 1902 – 4 July 1974) was an English novelist and short-story writer, in both the Regency romance and detective fiction genres.

Her husband often provided basic outlines for the plots of her thrillers, leaving Heyer to develop character relationships and dialogue so as to bring the story to life.

[6] Although the family's surname had been pronounced "higher", the advent of war led her father to switch to the pronunciation "hair" so they would not be mistaken for Germans.

His agent found a publisher for her book, and The Black Moth, about the adventures of a young man who took responsibility for his brother's card-cheating, was issued in 1921.

[12] The book appeared in the midst of the 1926 United Kingdom general strike; as a result the novel received no newspaper coverage, reviews or advertising.

[20] Because the lack of publicity had not harmed the novel's sales, Heyer refused for the rest of her life to promote her books, even though her publishers often asked her to give interviews.

[22] While in Tanganyika Heyer wrote The Masqueraders; set in 1745, the book follows the romantic adventures of siblings who pretend to be of the opposite sex in order to protect their family, all former Jacobites.

[22][24] After a failed experiment running a gas, coke and lighting company Rougier purchased a sports shop in Horsham with money they borrowed from Heyer's aunts.

According to the literary critic Kay Mussell, the books revolved around a "structured social ritual – the marriage market represented by the London season" where "all are in danger of ostracism for inappropriate behavior".

According to Pamela Regis in her work A Natural History of the Romance Novel, because Heyer's stories took place amidst events that had occurred more than 100 years earlier, she had to include more detail on the period in order for her readers to understand it.

[35] Others, including A.S. Byatt, believe that Heyer's "awareness of this atmosphere – both of the minute details of the social pursuits of her leisured classes and of the emotional structure behind the fiction it produced – is her greatest asset".

In addition to the standard historical works about the medieval and eighteenth-century periods, her library included histories of snuff boxes, sign posts and costumes.

[39] She often clipped illustrations from magazine articles and jotted down interesting vocabulary or facts onto note cards but rarely recorded where she found the information.

[40] Her notes were sorted into categories, such as Beauty, Colours, Dress, Hats, Household, Prices and Shops, and even included details such as the cost of candles in a particular year.

[44] Her knowledge of the period was so extensive that Heyer rarely mentioned dates explicitly in her books; instead, she situated the story by casually referring to major and minor events of the time.

She found it difficult at times to rely on someone else's plots; on at least one occasion, before writing the last chapter of a book, she asked Rougier to explain once again how the murder was really committed.

The two were never as popular as other contemporary fictional detectives such as Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot and Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey.

[66] Critic Erik Routley labelled many of her characters clichés, including the uneducated policeman, an exotic Spanish dancer, and a country vicar with a neurotic wife.

[69] Despite the stereotypes, however, Routley maintains that Heyer had "a quite remarkable gift for reproducing the brittle and ironic conversation of the upper middle class Englishwoman of that age (immediately before 1940)".

The Blitz bombing of 1940–41 disrupted train travel in Britain, prompting Heyer and her family to move to London in 1942 so that Rougier would be closer to his work.

To meet their expenses Heyer sold the Commonwealth rights for These Old Shades, Devil's Cub, and Regency Buck to her publisher, Heinemann, for £750.

To pay the tax bill, Heyer wrote two articles, "Books about the Brontës" and "How to be a Literary Writer", that were published in the magazine Punch.

[23][77] She once wrote to a friend, "I'm getting so tired of writing books for the benefit of the Treasury and I can't tell you how utterly I resent the squandering of my money on such fatuous things as Education and Making Life Easy and Luxurious for So-Called Workers.

"[78] In 1950, Heyer began working on what she called "the magnum opus of my latter years", a medieval trilogy intended to cover the House of Lancaster between 1393 and 1435.

Her impatient readers continually clamored for new books; to satisfy them and her tax liabilities, Heyer interrupted herself to write Regency romances.

[81] Heyer's new accountants urged her to abandon Heron Enterprises; after two years, she finally agreed to sell the company to Booker-McConnell, which already owned the rights to the estates of novelists Ian Fleming and Agatha Christie.

Her novels, which journalist Lesley McDowell described as containing "derring-do, dashing blades, and maids in peril", allowed readers to escape from the mundane and difficult elements of their lives.

[97] As other novelists began to imitate her style and continue to develop the Regency romance, their novels have been described as "following in the romantic tradition of Georgette Heyer".

[110] Despite her popularity and success, Heyer was largely ignored by critics other than Dorothy L. Sayers, who reviewed The Unfinished Clue and Death in the Stocks for The Sunday Times.

The 1974 edition of the encyclopædia, published shortly after her death, included entries on popular writers Agatha Christie and Sayers, but did not mention Heyer.