John McAleer is the Edgar Allan Poe Award-winning author of Rex Stout: A Biography and the Pulitzer nominated Emerson: Days of Encounter. He taught English Literature at Harvard and then Boston College for more than half a century and was also a permanent fellow at Durham University, England. McAleer created 1920s London-based private detective Henry von Stray in 1937, during the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. The Great Depression and McAleer's World War Two service interrupted the von Stray series and all the stories were believed lost until an original von Stray manuscript was discovered more than 80 years later.
