Catherine Louisa Pirkis

Catherine Louisa Pirkis (6 October 1839 – 4 October 1910) was a British author of detective fiction and animal welfare activist. Throughout her career as a writer, Pirkis would sometimes write under the name of C. L. Pirkis, to avoid gender association.

Early life and family

Catherine Louisa Lyne was born to Lewis Stephens Lyne and his wife Susan, who were of a middle-class family. Her father was an accountant and comptroller for the Inland Revenue. Her grandfather was Reverend Richard Lyne, master of a grammar school at Liskeard, Cornwall, and best known for authoring a widely used manual, The Latin Primer (1794).

Catherine was baptized at Saint John The Baptist, Shoreditch, London on 6 November 1839. She had eight siblings and the family moved around quite frequently.

Writing career

Pirkis wrote a total of 14 novels in the years spanning between 1877 and 1894 and contributed to periodicals and magazines such as Belgravia, which had been founded by the sensation novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Her first major novel, Disappeared from Her Home, represented her foray into the mystery genre with the story of a young girl disappearing from her home. This would also serve as a prelude to the creation of the female detective character Loveday Brooke, for which Pirkis is best known.

The collection was serialized and featured in The Ludgate Monthly from February to July 1893, and formally published in physical book form by Hutchinson in 1894. The series followed a "casebook format", which was made popular by other reigning literary protagonists of the time like Sherlock Holmes, where detective characters had to identify the suspects of the mystery and actively set traps to capture them. The series was notable for being both female-authored and featuring a professional woman detective as the heroine.