Sarah Caudwell

Sarah Cockburn, who wrote under the pseudonym of Sarah Caudwell, was a British barrister and author of detective stories. Her series of four murder stories written between 1980 and 1999 centered on a group of young barristers practicing in Lincoln's Inn, narrated by a Hilary Tamar, a professor of medieval law whose gender is never specified, who fills the role of detective.

Sarah Cockburn was born on 27 May 1939 in Weir Road, London. Her father was Claud Cockburn, the left-wing journalist, and her mother was Jean Ross, a journalist and political activist. Ross was also inspiration for the character Sally Bowles in Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin and its musical adaptation Cabaret. 

During World War II, she lived in Welwyn and Stevenage, Hertfordshire, with her mother and maternal grandmother. In 1945, they moved to Cheltenham. She and her mother moved to Scotland in the 1950s, where she attended Aberdeen High School for Girls. She received her MA in classics from the University of Aberdeen in 1960 and won a scholarship to study in Greece.

She then studied law at St Anne's College, University of Oxford. She was one of the first two female students invited to speak at the Oxford Union, after her friends Jenny Grove and Rose Dugdale dressed in men's clothes to gain entrance to the male-only debating chamber and had then canvassed support for the admission of female students. She graduated with her BCL in 1962.

On coming down from Oxford, she lectured on Law at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. She then spent a year at Cité Universitaire des Jeunes Filles at Nancy, receiving a diploma in French law. Having been called to the Bar in 1966, she joined the Chancery bar. She practised as a barrister first at the Middle Temple and then at Lincoln's Inn, specialising in property and tax law. She later joined Lloyds Bank, where she specialised in international tax planning and became a senior executive in the trust department. It was at this time that she started to write.

Fellow barrister John Tackebury praised her accomplishments at the bar: "As a woman, she had to have had a first-class mind to join the Chancery bar, to have built up a successful practice and to have become a senior executive at Lloyds... All these institutions were highly resistant to women at a senior level, and certainly to a woman who smoked a pipe."

Caudwell was a pipe-smoker, and inveterate crossword solver, reaching the final of The Times Crossword Competition more than once. For many years, she lived in Barnes, London, with her mother and aunt. She died of throat cancer on 28 January 2000 in Whitehall, London.