Patricia Carlon was born in Wagga Wagga in 1927 but lived in Sydney from an early age. When she was eleven she became profoundly deaf, but she successfully completed her education and set about fulfilling her ambition to become a writer. She became a prize-winning cook, a keen gardener and cat-lover. She never married. All her life she avoided publicity and few people knew about her deafness.
She wrote everything from stories and serials to short and long novels. Her work was published in Australia, England and the US under various names in newspapers and magazines, including Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Much of her pseudonymous writing was in romantic fiction. Her most substantial work, however, encompasses crime and thriller novels, including The Souvenir, The Whispering Wall, The Running Woman and The Price of an Orphan.
Fourteen of Patricia Carlon's mystery novels were published between 1961 and 1970 in England, mostly by Hodder & Stoughton in the King Crime series, but she could not find an Australian home for her work because, she said, publishers here 'didn't want anything but police procedure stuff'. She was, however, awarded Commonwealth Literary Fellowships in 1970 and 1973.
In the early 1990s two of her novels appeared in Australia, and her work was subsequently translated into seven languages. She received rave reviews in the US, and has often been compared to Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock and Ruth Rendell.
Patricia Carlon died in Sydney in July 2002, soon after her work was relaunched in Australia with the publication of Crime of Silence.
Books by Patricia Carlon
