Susan Moody (1940–)

Abstract It is not surprising that Susan Moody has penned this story of treachery on the water entitled “Oh, Who Hath Done This Deed?” Moody grew up in Oxford but spent numerous holidays along the hazardous waterfront at Deal, near Dover, England. She has described the view from her childhood holiday home as containing “the spars of wrecked ships,” which “stuck up on the horizon like the arms of sailors, not waving, but drowning.” Even the sandbar where she played cricket between tides became quicksand as the tide turned. The daughter of an Oxford don, Moody was born Susan Elizabeth Horwood. She was educated at the Oxford High School for Girls and at the Open University, an educational alternative that Moody describes as “started by the socialists and implemented by the Tories.” Moody then spent two years in France, assisting an expert orchid grower. She later married an American biologist and moved to Tennessee, where she lived for ten years. After her first husband died, she remarried and continued to raise three sons in Bedford, England. She has worked as a creative writing teacher at H.M. Prison, Bedford, and has served as vice chairman and as chairman of the British Crime Writers Association. In recent years she has taken up residence again in Oxford.