Helen MacInnes

Helen Clark MacInnes (1907-1985) was a Scottish-born American author of espionage fiction. Trained as a librarian, she married the classicist Gilbert Highet in 1932 and settled with him in New York, where he taught at Columbia University. Her first novel, Above Suspicion (1941), was set in Nazi Europe, and over the next four decades she wrote more than twenty thrillers of international intrigue, ending with Ride a Pale Horse (1984). Four of them were adapted for film, and she was often called the queen of international espionage fiction.