Mary Garden Collins was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on January 14, 1908. Her family moved to Berkeley, California, when she was three, where she went to public school, and eventually attended Miss Burke's School in San Francisco as well as the University of California. In 1938, after selling a few fiction stories to the magazine The Passing Show, she decided to change her focus to mysteries. Collins wrote six mystery novels between 1941 and 1949, all set in the San Francisco area, beginning with The Fog Comes published by Scribner's. Author Gertrude Atherton once described Collins as "tall and slender, has charming manners and knows how to dress." After her sixth novel, she retired from writing to devote herself to child‐rearing and managing the household. She died from emphysema in 1979.