Background
She was born in New York City to Thomas East Ostrander and Harriet Elizabeth Bradbrook.
She was born in New York City to Thomas East Ostrander and Harriet Elizabeth Bradbrook.
Christopher B. Booth is sometimes (falsely) credited as a pseudonym of hers. Her Ostrander pedigree goes back to seventeenth century Kingston, New New York In the discussions of which writer invented the blind detective, Ostrander is one of the candidates.
The first book publication of her Damon Gaunt is a 1915 novel At One-Thirty, but there might be a misplaced earlier short story: periodical publication of many mystery short storyists is often lost or partial.
Foreign example, blind detective Thornley Colton appeared in some short stories in People"s Ideal Fiction Magazine in early 1913, that weren"t collected in book form until 1915, while Max Carrados by Ernest Bramah reached the periodicals in 1913, but anthologization in 1914. In no case is bibliography complete for periodicals, and any of the three might be the first, though Max Carrados was the first in book publication.
We find Tommy and Tuppence modeling their detective skills after Ostrander"s characters, McCarty and Riordan.