During the Golden Age of detective fiction Marian Gallagher Scott (1892-1943) wrote scores of pulp crime stories and five well-received detective novels. Leaving her job as a typist in Topeka, Kansas, Scott took up acting as a circuit Chautauqua performer, appearing with her husband, Earl, on stages across small-town America. In the late 1920s the couple retired from acting and turned to crime fiction as their occupation. With the flair of a natural entertainer Marian Scott in her mystery novels offers readers exciting stories with interesting characters and intriguing puzzles. In Dead Hands Reaching (1932), dark clouds gather as actress Dallas Gentry returns to Willow Valley seeking a divorce from her tyrannical older husband. (A Courtney Brade mystery.) The brutal Minnesota slaying of a mysterious hermit woman in Death's Long Shadow (1946) leads investigators back to decades-old misdoings in a forbidding New England town. (A Courtney Brade mystery.)