L. T. Meade

L. T. Meade was the pen name of Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith (died 1914), a prolific Anglo-Irish author of the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Best known in her own day for girls' school stories, she was also a pioneer of popular mystery and detective fiction, devising early female sleuths and criminal masterminds such as Madame Sara. For this book she wrote with Robert Eustace, the pen name of physician Eustace Robert Barton, who provided the medical and scientific detail behind the plots and who later collaborated with Dorothy L. Sayers.