Scottish novelist Helen MacInnes was born in Glasgow on 7 October 1907. She later became one of the best-known writers of twentieth-century espionage fiction.

MacInnes spent part of her childhood in Helensburgh, where she attended Hermitage School, before continuing her education in Glasgow. She studied at the University of Glasgow and graduated with an MA in 1928. She later trained as a librarian at University College London.

While studying in Glasgow, MacInnes met the classical scholar Gilbert Highet. They married in 1932 and travelled widely in Europe before the Second World War. MacInnes later drew on those journeys and her knowledge of European politics and places when writing her novels.

The couple moved to the United States in 1937 after Highet obtained an academic appointment there. MacInnes’s first novel, Above Suspicion, was published in 1941 and used the threat of Nazi Germany as the basis for an espionage story.

She continued writing political and espionage thrillers for more than four decades. Her later novels shifted from the Second World War to Cold War tensions, and she published her final novel, Ride a Pale Horse, in 1984.