Natalie Sumner Lincoln

Natalie Sumner Lincoln (1881–1935) was an American writer of detective fiction, born in Washington, D.C., where she lived all her life and set almost all of her twenty-odd mysteries. The daughter of a Treasury official, she worked as a society journalist and as editor of a newspaper for the Daughters of the American Revolution before her first novel, The Trevor Case, appeared in 1912. The Red Seal, The Moving Finger and The Thirteenth Letter followed at the rate of about one a year, with casts of diplomats, senators and old Washington families and plots that turn on disguise, inheritance and secret identity. Several were filmed in the 1920s.