Wissenswertes

Living in a suburb of Edinburgh, Scotland, in the mid-1970s, she called herself "an ordinary housewife" with "a house and a husband and a garden and a cat to love and look after."

One of three children of Frederick A. Rainbow, a clergyman, and Mary Edith Rainbow, a New Zealand missionary. Mary began teaching in the late 1930s, but quit in 1956 to concentrate on writing novels. Her husband, Sir Frederick Henry Stewart (1916-2001), was a professor of geology at the University of Edinburgh.

The preeminent and very popular writer of the romantic thriller. Her heroines, who usually narrate the story in first-person, are intelligent and capable, and her heroes are handsome but ordinary guys thrust into challenging situations. Her great contribution to the thriller is disposing of the conventional helpless heroine.

Biography/bibliography in: "Contemporary Authors". New Revision Series, Vol. 130, pp. 377-382. Farmington Hills, MI: Thomson Gale, 2005.