Susan Wittig Albert


Susan Wittig Albert, also known by the pen names Robin Paige and Carolyn Keene, is an American mystery writer from Vermilion County, Illinois, United States.

Biography

Albert grew up in downstate Illinois, attending Danville High School before moving to the nearby community of Bismarck, where she graduated. She earned a degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. She became a professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin and was a university administrator at Sophie Newcomb College in New Orleans and vice president for academic affairs at Southwest Texas State University. She writes a column for Country Living Gardener magazine.
Her writing career has included the Nancy Drew mysteries under the pen name Carolyn Keene in the 1980s.
By the 1990s, Albert wrote Thyme of Death, her first China Bayles novel. The book was nominated for two national mystery awards, the 1992 Agatha and the 1993 Anthony in the "Best First Novel" category.
The titles of all the China Bayles novels include the names of herbs and include herbal themes that invoke the title. Albert is a guest speaker at both herbal clubs and women's groups around the country. She describes her books as "cozy mysteries" because they do not contain much violence or gratuitous behavior.
Albert and her husband, Bill, have also co-written The Robin Paige Victorian Mysteries, a series of a dozen mysteries set in the late Victorian era. Albert is also the author of The Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter, a series of mysteries featuring author Beatrix Potter.

Fiction

The China Bayles herbal mysteries center around the title character's deductive reasoning and knowledge as an herbalist and ex-lawyer, who solves murders with her best friend, Ruby Wilcox, owner of a New Age shop.
The trilogy of novellas features characters from the China Bayles mysteries, focused on reporter Jessica Nelson and the Enterprise newspaper.
These were co-written with her husband, Bill Albert under the name Robin Paige.
Takes place in a fictitious town called Darling, Alabama during the 1930s. Centers on a group of amateur, mystery solving women in a garden club called the Darling Dahlias.