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Joseph Shearing is not a man but a woman. Mrs. Gabrielle Margaret Vere Campbell Long has finally confessed to the authorship of the "Joseph Shearing" novels. For some time she had been suspected as the author "who indeed possesses many of the necessary qualifications, such as a knowledge of English Bohemian life and of French and English criminology."

Mrs. Long is an English historical novelist and short story writer, born on Hayling Island, the daughter of a Moravian clergyman. As a child she was haunted by nocturnal fears, and she deeply disliked the Bohemian life led by her emotionally unstable mother. She taught herself to read and to paint, disregarded the fact that she seldom had enough to eat, and made the most of the materials at hand.

She studied art at the Slade School in London and spent a year in Paris absorbing French history and local color. Her first novel was published when she was sixteen. It was a success, although she waived royalties and received only sixty pounds by grace of her publisher. More favorable terms were arranged for subsequent works, and she began a steady "grind" of writing to support her extravagant mother and her sister.

After about ten years she married Don Zeffrino Emilio Costanzo, a Sicilian who died in 1916. a son survived. In 1917 she married Arthur L. Long of Richmond, Surrey, and by this marriage she has two sons.

Joseph Shearing is not the only pseudonym Mrs. Long has adopted. Her best known one is perhaps Marjorie Bowen, her only feminine nom de plume. Under it she has some sixty-odd titles to her credit.

She has three other male pseudonyms: "George Preedy," "Robert Paye," and "John Winch." As "George Preedy" she has written about twenty books. "Robert Paye" and "John Winch" have each written only four or five.

The Joseph Shearing novels number about a dozen. The first of these, called Forget-me-Not in England but changed to Lucille Clery; A Woman of Intrigue in the United States, dealt with the same Paris murder case—the murder of the Duchesse de Praslin in Paris, 1847—as did Rachel Field's All This and Heaven Too. It was re-issued in 1941 as The Strange Case of Lucille, Clery.

Of the Shearing novels, Sally Benson wrote in The New Yorker that "there are many adjectives that apply to all Mr. Shearing's books: evil, sinister, ghostly, strange, baleful, terrible, relentless, malevolent. Such experts in murder as Edumnd Pearson and the former Scotch barrister William Roughead have declared openly that the Shearing novels are the best of their kind published today. Mr. Shearing is adept at stitching together his swooning heroines, his young baronets, his flickering candles in their tall sconces, his hothouse fruits in high silver-gilt epergnes with a strong, red thread of murder. Mr. Shearing is a painstaking technician and a master of horror. There is no one else quite like him."

[Compiled from information in Twentieth Century Authors by Kunitz and Haycraft, published by the H. W. Wilson Company.]

Cover of the 1st US edition (Harrison-Hilton) 1940