Thomas Hardy was born in Dorset in 1840. His first published novel was Desperate Remedies in 1871. Such was the success of these early works, which included A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) and Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), that he gave up his work as an architect to concentrate on his writing.

However, he had difficulty publishing Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1889) and was forced to make changes in order for it to be judged suitable for family readers. This, coupled with the stormy reaction to the negative tone of Jude the Obscure (1895), prompted Hardy to abandon writing novels altogether and he concentrated on poetry for the rest of his life. He died in January 1928.

Baroness Orczy (1865-1947) was a Hungarian-born British author, best known for her Scarlet Pimpernel novels. Her Teahouse Detective, who features in The Old Man in the Corner, was one of the first fictional sleuths created in response to the Sherlock Holmes stories' huge success.

Initially serialised in magazines, the stories in this collection were first published in book form in 1908 and have since been adapted for radio, television and film. Two more collections of Teahouse Detective mysteries are forthcoming from Pushkin Vertigo.