Edgar Alfred Jepson (1863–1938) graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, then spent five years in Barbados before returning to take a job as an editor at Vanity Fair, where he worked with Richard Middleton and the libidinous Frank Harris. He became involved, albeit tangentially, with such members of the Decadent Movement as Ernest Dowson, John Gawsworth (with whom he collaborated on several short stories), and Arthur Machen.
The first novel Jepson wrote under his own name, Sibyl Falcon (1895), features a female adventurer; he followed with such fantasy novels and thrillers as The Mystery of the Myrtles (1909), which involves human sacrifice, and The Moon Gods (1930), a lost-race novel. He may be more widely read as a translator than as a novelist, however, having brought many works by Maurice Leblanc to English-language readers. His son, Selwyn Jepson, was a prolific mystery writer, and his granddaughter is the noted British novelist Fay Weldon.
Dr. Eustace Robert Barton (1868–1943), using the pseudonym Robert Eustace, is known mainly for his collaborations with other writers, including several additional stories with Edgar Jepson; a novel, The Stolen Pearl: A Romance of London (1903), with the once-popular mystery writer Gertrude Warden; several books with L.T. Meade; and, most famously, a novel, The Documents in the Case (1930), with Dorothy L. Sayers.
Much like Craig Kennedy and Dr. Thorndyke, Ruth Kelstern, although an amateur detective in this story, brought scientific methods to her work, undoubtedly a skill learned in her father’s laboratory, where she assisted him in a high-paying job.
“The Tea-Leaf” was originally published in the October 1925 issue of The Strand Magazine; it was first published in book form in Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery and Horror, edited by Dorothy L. Sayers (London, Gollancz, 1928).