DOROTHY B. HUGHES was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and lived most of her life in New Mexico. A journalist and a poet (a book of her verse was published in the Yale Younger Poets Series), she began publishing mystery novels in the 1940s. The more than a dozen books she eventually published were made into successful films: The Fallen Sparrow (1943), Ride the Pink Horse (1947), and In a Lonely Place (1950, directed by Nicholas Ray, starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame).
In 1950 Hughes won a coveted Edgar Allen Poe Award from the Mystery Writers of America (MWA). Then, at the height of her career, she stopped writing in order to take care of an ailing mother and several grandchildren. In her later years she reviewed mysteries for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Herald Tribune, and other papers. She won a second Edgar Award in 1978 for her biography Erle Stanley Gardner: The Case of the Real Perry Mason and was named a Grand Master by the MWA.