Carole Nelson Douglas Add a review

Carole Nelson Douglas (November 15, 1944 – October 20, 2021) was an American writer of sixty novels and many short stories. She has written in many genres, but is best known for two popular mystery series, the Irene Adler Sherlockian suspense novels and the Midnight Louie mystery series.

Douglas was a theater and English literature major in college. After graduation, she worked as a newspaper reporter and then editor in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul area. During her time there, she discovered a long, expensive classified advertisement offering a black cat named Midnight Louie to the "right" home for one dollar and wrote a feature story on the plucky survival artist, putting it into the cat's point of view. The cat found a country home but its name was revived for her feline PI mystery series many years later. Some of the Midnight Louie series entries include the dedication "For the real and original Midnight Louie. Nine lives were not enough."

She began writing fiction in the late 1970s. The late director/playwright/novelist Garson Kanin, a pleased interview subject, took her first novel to Doubleday and it sold shortly after. Amberleigh is a post-feminist historical Gothic novel. Douglas has always addressed women's issues in her fiction and preferred mixing genres from contemporary to historical mystery/thriller, romance and women's fiction, and high and urban fantasy.

Douglas lived in north Texas with her husband, Sam Douglas, and adopted cats.