Shelley Smith – the pseudonym employed by English author Nancy Hermione Bodington (1912-1998) – began her writing career in the early 1940s with a series of crime novels that featured the private detective Jacob Chaos. Having honed her talent over several books and short stories, she alighted on a style in which the ‘detective fiction’ of her early career was blended with tense and gripping psychological suspense, producing a type of novel that set her apart from her more traditional contemporaries.