Mavis Doriel Hay

Mavis Doriel Hay was a novelist who was born in 1894 in Potters Bar, Middlesex, and spent her early life in north London. She was born into a middle-class family and went on to attend St Hilda's, Oxford, around the same time that Dorothy L Sayers was at Somerville. Hay's writing career was relatively brief, but she made a significant contribution to the golden age of British crime fiction.\n \nHay published only three detective novels during her lifetime: 'Murder Underground' (1934), 'Death on the Cherwell' (1935), and 'The Santa Klaus Murder' (1936). These titles were all well-received on publication and are still regarded as classics of the genre today. In addition to her mystery novels, Hay was also an expert on rural handicraft and wrote several books on the subject, including 'Rural Industries of England and Wales' with co-author Helen Elizabeth Fitzrandolph.\n \nIn 1929, Hay married Archibald Menzies Fitzrandolph, a member of a wealthy and influential family of loyalist Canadians. Archibald joined the RAF but was killed in a flying accident in 1943, one of a number of tragedies that struck Hay. One of her brothers was killed aged 19 when his ship was sunk during the Battle of Jutland in 1916, her youngest sibling was killed when his Tiger Moth crashed in a Malayan jungle in 1939, and in 1940 a third brother lost his life working on the notorious Thailand-Burma railway after being captured by the Japanese.\n \nAfter setting aside her mystery novels, Hay took up a role as a researcher for the Rural Industries Bureau, which was established to encourage craft industries in deprived areas. She was said to be so well-connected that she was able to arrange exhibitions in the homes of the aristocracy, connections that had probably come about from one of Archibald's cousins marrying Sir John Dashwood and the fact that the cousin then became a lady-in-waiting at the court of King George V. Hay's final book, 'Quilting', was published in 1972, just seven years before her death, which occurred in the village of Box in Gloucestershire.