Elizabeth Ferrars
Elizabeth Ferrars (6 September 1907 – 30 March 1995), born Morna Doris MacTaggart, was a British
Life and work
Morna MacTaggart was born the fifth child of Peter Clouston and Marie MacTaggart (née Ferrars) in Rangoon (currently Yangon), during British rule in Burma. Her father worked for Bullock Brothers, a Scottish timber and rice-trading company. Her maternal grandparents where the Irish-German couple Max Henry and Bertha Ferrars, who had taken residence in Freiburg, southern Germany, after having lived and worked in Burma for many years until 1896.[1] At an early age, the MacTaggarts sent each of their children for schooling to live with their grandparents in Freiburg. There, Morna grew up speaking both English and German during her early years of schooling.[2]
The deteriorating political climate between Britain and Germany before
Around 1940, she met a lecturer in Botany at
From 1957, when her husband was appointed Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Edinburgh, they lived in Edinburgh until shortly after his retirement in 1977. Citing the long, cold winters as a reason, they then moved south to the village of Blewbury in Oxfordshire, where they lived until her sudden death in 1995. She professed no religious faith and was probably instrumental in turning her husband from distinct evangelism in the 1930s towards agnosticism.[citation needed] She was buried in Blewbury in a non-religious ceremony. Her final novel, A Thief in the Night, was published posthumously in 1995. She was survived by a nephew, Peter MacTaggart, who holds the copyright of her novels.[8] In the United States, her novels were published under the name E.X. Ferrars, her US publishers assuring her that "the 'X' would 'do it'".[9]
Though the majority of Ferrars's works are standalone novels, she also wrote several series.
Her extraordinary output owes a great deal to considerable self-discipline and diligent method. Her plots were worked out in detail in hand-written notebooks before being filled out in typed manuscript; she said that they were worked backwards from the
Her books are written so that readers are spared from violence or extreme unpleasantness. Due to their backgrounds, her characters do not expect crime or violence to impinge on their lives. They are educated, and often work in academic or artistic fields. Female characters are independent and "politely feminist."[10]
Bibliography
Novels written as Morna MacTaggart
- Turn Single (1932)
- Broken Music (1934)
Toby Dyke series
- Give a Corpse a Bad Name (1940)
- Remove the Bodies (1941) (published in the US as Rehearsals for Murder)
- Death in Botanist's Bay (1941) (published in the US as Murder of a Suicide)
- Don't Monkey with Murder (1942) (published in the US as The Shape of a Stain)
- Your Neck in a Noose (1942) (published in the US as Neck in a Noose)
Virginia and Felix Freer series
- Last Will and Testament (1978)
- Frog in the Throat (1980)
- Thinner Than Water (1981)
- Death of a Minor Character (1983)
- I Met Murder (1985)
- Woman Slaughter (1989)
- Sleep of the Unjust (1990)
- Beware of the Dog (1992)
Andrew Basnett series
- Something Wicked (1983)
- The Root of All Evil (1984)
- The Crime and the Crystal (1985)
- The Other Devil's Name (1986)
- A Murder Too Many (1988)
- Smoke Without Fire (1990)
- A Hobby of Murder (1994)
- A Choice of Evils (1995)
Other novels
- I, Said The Fly (1945)
- Murder among Friends (1946) (published in the US as Cheat the Hangman)
- With Murder in Mind (1948)
- The March Hare Murders (1949)
- Milk of Human Kindness (1950)
- Hunt the Tortoise (1950)
- The Clock that Wouldn't Stop (1952)
- Alibi for a Witch (1952)
- Murder in Time (1953)
- The Lying Voices (1954)
- Enough to Kill a Horse (1955)
- Always Say Die (1956) (published in the US as We Haven't Seen Her Lately; see Media Adaptations)
- Murder Moves In (1956) (published in the US as Kill or Cure)
- Furnished for Murder (1957)
- Unreasonable Doubt (1958) (published in the US as Count the Cost)
- A Tale of Two Murders (1959) (published in the US as Depart This Life)
- Fear the Light (1960)
- Sleeping Dogs (1960)
- The Wandering Widows (1962)
- The Busy Body (1962) (published in the US as Seeing Double)
- The Doubly Dead (1963)
- A Legal Fiction (1964) (published in the US as The Decayed Gentlewoman)
- Ninth Life (1965)
- No Peace for the Wicked (1965)
- Zero at the Bone (1967)
- The Swaying Pillars (1968)
- Skeleton Staff (1969)
- The Seven Sleepers (1970)
- A Stranger and Afraid (1971)
- Breath of Suspicion (1972)
- The Small World of Murder (1973)
- Foot in the Grave (1973)
- Hanged Man's House (1974)
- Alive and Dead (1974)
- Drowned Rat (1975)
- The Cup and the Lip (1975)
- Blood Flies Upwards (1976)
- Pretty Pink Shroud (1977)
- Murders Anonymous (1977)
- In at the Kill (1978)
- Witness Before the Fact (1979)
- Experiment with Death (1981)
- Skeleton in Search of a Cupboard (1982) (published in the US as Skeleton in Search of a Closet)
- Come and Be Killed (1987)
- Trial by Fury (1989)
- Danger from the Dead (1991)
- Answer Came There None (1992)
- Thy Brother Death (1993)
- Seeing Is Believing (1994)
- A Thief in the Night (1995)
Short story compilations
- Designs on Life (1980)
- Sequence of Events (1989)
- The Casebook of Jonas P. Jonas and Other Mysteries (Crippen & Landru, 2012)
Short stories
- Drawn into Error (1963, published in the 4th Bedtime Mystery Book)
- Instrument of Justice (1986, published in the Best of Winter's Crimes)
Articles
- "No Danger to Detectives!" (Reply to sci-fi author John Wyndham's "Roar of the Rockets."[11]), John O'London's Weekly 9 April 1954.
Other
- Introduction, Planned Departures: A Crime Writers Association Anthology (Hodder & Stoughton, 1958)
Media adaptations
- "We Haven't Seen Her Lately," adapted from the novel by E. X. Ferrars and starring George C. Scott, Kraft Television Theatre (Aug. 1958)[12]
References
- OCLC 50271270.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-7864-4435-9. Retrieved 27 December 2023.
- ^ a b c Jack Adrian (12 April 1995). "Obituaries: Elizabeth Ferrars". The Independent.
- ^ Conversations with her husband's nephew, Tom Brown,1986–99
- ^ Inherited by her husbands's nephew. T.S. Eliot edition inscribed by A.G. Staniland donated to library of Jesus College, Oxford in 2021.
- ISBN 978-0-8108-1190-4.
- ^ "gadetection / Detection Club, The". gadetection.pbworks.com. Retrieved 27 December 2023.
- ISBN 978-1-4719-0697-8.
- ISBN 978-0-19-515761-1.
- )
- ^ "The John Wyndham Archive, 1930-2001". 21 July 2014. Archived from the original on 21 July 2014. Retrieved 27 December 2023.
- ^ "Archival Resources in Wisconsin: Descriptive Finding Aids". digicoll.library.wisc.edu. Retrieved 27 December 2023.