Sarah L. Caudwell

Excerpts from the obituary: http://www.theguardian.com/news/2000/feb/08/guardianobituaries1
by Jenny Chamier Grove
The Guardian, Tuesday 8 February 2000 01.09 GMT

Sarah Caudwell, who has died of cancer aged 60, was a barrister who turned to crime writing when she ran out of good crime novels to read.

It is no coincidence that the titles of all Sarah's books contain classical references. She was educated at Aberdeen high school for girls and the local university, where she read Latin and ancient Greek. She then read law at St Anne's College, Oxford, where she was a fast-talking undergraduate, puffing at her pipe and sometimes composing humorous verse.

One such occasion began with a party in Balliol College, Oxford, where she made overtures to a don whom she considered to have "a good profile". He resisted her efforts to further the acquaintance. But the don, who lectured in English, was known for his habit of watching television and, a few days later, Sarah sent him a verse:

I cast aside my modesty, I laid aside my shame/ And on my knees I offered love - or something much the same/ You brushed my powder from your sleeve, with elegant precision/ And murmured: "Conversation is killing television."

Called to the Bar in 1965, she left in the mid-1970s to become deputy legal adviser to the trust division of Lloyd's Bank. But it was her life as a junior chancery barrister that formed the basis of her books, and several of her friends from those days can be discerned, thinly disguised, among her fictional characters.