Elizabeth Ferrars

Elizabeth Ferrars (6 September 1907 – 30 March 1995), born Morna Doris MacTaggart, was a British crime writer.

She was born in Rangoon (currently Yangon), Burma into a Scottish timber and rice-trading family. Her early years were in the hands of a German nanny, and the initial intention was that she should be sent to Berlin to complete her education. The deteriorating political climate between Britain and Germany led to a late switch to Britain instead at the age of six, ending up at Bedales School (1918–1924). She claimed in later years that she never would have been able to write crime novels if she had not learned German as a child from her nanny: the rigorous sentence structure and complex rules of grammar being an indispensable preparation for the architecture of a crime thriller. Unable to study English Literature, because she was never taught Latin or Greek, she took a diploma in journalism at London University (1925–1928), and wrote two novels under her own name in the early 1930s, when she met and married her first husband. Around 1940, she met a Lecturer in Botany at Bedford College, Dr (later Professor) Robert Brown, and the same year her first crime novel, Give a Corpse a Bad Name, was published. She separated from her first husband and lived with Robert Brown in Belsize Park, London, from 1942. However, she did not obtain a divorce and marry Brown until October 1945. She remained on friendly terms with her first husband, who also remarried. In 1951 they moved to Cornell University in the USA, where her husband had been offered a post. Notwithstanding the financial attraction of such a posting in austerity postwar Britain, they returned a year later owing to the atmosphere of McCarthyism. Having seen the rise of fascism in Europe, they were disturbed by witch-hunts against many writers and academics accused of communist sympathies. In 1953, she became one of the founding members of the Crime Writers' Association, and she was its chair in 1977. She was inducted into the famed Detection Club in 1958.

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