Hart, Frances Noyes


Frances Newbold Noyes Hart (1890-1943) won fame with The Bellamy Trial, listed as one of the Haycraft-Queen detective fiction 'cornerstones'. A relative of Edith Wharton, Hart was born in Maryland and educated at the Sorbonne and Columbia University. Her father, Frank Noyes, was publisher of the Washington Star. She married lawyer Edward Henry Hart in 1921. The couple had two daughters. Hart was a translator for Naval Intelligence and an overseas YMCA canteen worker during WW1.

The Bellamy Trial, based on New Jersey's Hall-Mills murder case, was a classic courtroom drama about the alleged murder of a wife by her husband and his lover. Her second novel, Hide in the Dark, recounts the solution of an old mystery during a house party, and The Crooked Lane is a love story including some scientific detection.

 

Bibliography

 

Contact and Other Stories (1923)

The Bellamy Trial (1927)

Hide in the Dark (1929)

The Crooked Lane (1934)