as the great-grandniece of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Fryniwyd Tennyson Jesse (1888–1958) studied art but turned to journalism when she was twenty, working for the London Times and The Daily Mail. In 1914, she moved to New York, became a war correspondent, and worked for the National Relief Commission, then headed by J. Edgar Hoover. She married when the war ended, and she and her husband lived in many places all around the world.
Avowing that her special interest was in murder, Jesse wrote several articles for the highly respected Notable British Trials series. Her Murder and Its Motives (1924) is a pioneering work that explores the subject in a general sense and continues with illustrative case studies. She wrote A Pin to See the Peepshow (1934), a long novel based on a famous British murder case in which the author chose to ascribe a husband’s death to “accidental murder,” which may have been a kindness to his wife.
Jesse’s best-known work is The Solange Stories (1931), a collection of stories about a young Frenchwoman, Solange Fontaine, who is “gifted by nature with an extra-spiritual sense that warn[s] her of evil.” The volume was selected by Ellery Queen for Queen’s Quorum as one of the 106 greatest short story collections in the history of detective fiction. Several additional Solange Fontaine stories were discovered and collected long after Jesse’s death in The Adventures of Solange Fontaine (1995).
“The Lover of St. Lys” was originally published in 1918 in The Premier Magazine; it was first collected in The Adventures of Solange Fontaine (London, Thomas Carnacki, 1995).