‘Josephine Bell’ was the pseudonym of Doris Bell Collier. She was born on 8 December 1897 in Chorlton-on-Medlock, Manchester, the daughter of Maud Tessimond Windsor and Joseph Collier, a surgeon. From 1910 she studied at Godolphin School, Salisbury, and in 1916, at the age of eighteen, she went up to Cambridge University to study Natural Sciences at Newnham College, taking time out to work on the land towards the end of the First World War.
Collier graduated in 1919, the same year that her elder brother Jack was killed in a flying accident in Spain, devastating her mother and her other brother Donald. In 1922, following in the footsteps of her father and great-grandfather, she decided to become a doctor and enrolled as a student at University College Hospital, London. She was diligent, even working in the emergency department of Hampstead General Hospital as a casualty officer. But she also had time for extramural matters and, on 6 January 1923 married Norman Dyer Ball, a pathologist at UCH who had lost an eye in the Great War. The following year, which included a spell as house physician, she gained the customary double degree of Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery.
The couple moved to Croom’s Hill in Greenwich where Dyer Ball set up in general practice, working alongside his wife until 1935 when ill health forced him to sell up. They moved to Walden in Headley, Hampshire, to stay with Collier’s mother, whose second husband Jean Éstradie had died three years earlier. Dyer Ball’s health began slowly to improve and the couple decided that the following summer they would make a long sea voyage. However, on the day after their thirteenth wedding anniversary and not long after he had been involved in a minor car accident, Dyer Ball drove up to London to do some shopping. He bumped into the wife of one of his neighbours at Croom’s Hill and offered to give her a lift home. However, their journey ended in tragedy when the car mounted the kerb, rolled over twice and collided with a lorry. His passenger died almost immediately while Dyer Ball died in hospital a little time later.
Not even forty years old and widowed with four young children, Collier moved to Bordon in East Hampshire. She secured a position as a Clinical Assistant at the Royal Surrey County Hospital in Guildford and to supplement her income turned to writing. Her first novel, Murder in Hospital (1937), dedicated to her late husband, was written under a pseudonym that some have suggested was an homage to the original of Sherlock Holmes, Dr Joseph Bell. However, the truth is much simpler: in coining the name ‘Josephine Bell’, Collier simply combined her own middle name with the first name of her father, who had died in 1905 before she was ten. Any connection to Joseph Bell was at most a happy coincidence.
Murder in Hospital was praised for its clever plot and even more so as a study of hospital mores. However, there are moments that jar for modern readers not least the portrayal of some characters that, while they might simply reflect the attitudes prevailing in the 1930s, are variously antisemitic and racist. For the novel, Bell introduced Dr David Wintringham, who would appear in eleven more novels including From Natural Causes (1941), which features an unusual method of murder, Death by Clairvoyance (1949), in which one of six identically dressed clowns is murdered at a buffet, and the horrific Bones in the Barrow (1953). Wintringham also appears in numerous short stories, many of which were published in the London Evening Standard.
As well as the Wintringham series, Collier wrote many other crime novels, often with a medical background and some with novel settings such as The House by the River (1959), set in Brittany, New People at the Hollies (1961), set in an old peoples’ home, and A Hole in the Ground (1971) in which a doctor returns to Cornwall to investigate an accident that he had witnessed twenty years earlier.
Collier also wrote historical romances and serial thrillers for magazines, such as The Dark Tide (1951). Her numerous straight novels include the possibly autobiographical Compassionate Adventure (1946) and The Bottom of the Well (1940) about a mismatched couple, but the best of her non-crime output are Total War at Haverington (1947), set during the air raids and chaos of war-torn London, and Wonderful Mrs Marriott (1948), about a domineering woman and the damage she wreaks on her family. There was also a non-criminous radio drama about a typhoid outbreak entitled Hidden Death (1949).
All the time Collier was writing, she continued to work, not least because she had four children to raise on her own. In 1941, she moved to the Royal Surrey’s gynaecology department until in 1944, a year after her mother’s death, she set up in general practice at ‘Willoughby’, 13 Albury Road, Guildford, still also pursuing her hobbies—gardening and sailing her five-ton sloop.
After retiring in 1954, Collier joined the management committee of St Luke’s Hospital in Guildford, a position she held until 1962. Perhaps more significantly, 1954 was also the year that she was elected a member of the Detection Club, the dining society for crime writers. A year later, Collier was among the founder members of the Crime Writers’ Association, later serving as the chair for 1959–1960. In this role, she spoke widely on crime fiction, including in 1959 a talk on the history and future of the crime novel to the literary society in Cranleigh, East Sussex. In 1960 she contributed to a series of radio plays by CWA members and in 1961 a series of short stories written by CWA members for newspaper syndication. After her term as chair ended, Collier remained on its main committee taking part in one of its most unusual meetings, held in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s and broadcast by the BBC in July 1967.
Writing almost up until the end of her life, Doris Bell Collier died in 1987. ‘A Torch at the Window’ was originally published in She, January 1960.