Dorothy Cameron Disney was born November 13, 1903, in the Indian Territory that became Oklahoma. She was educated at Barnard College in New York, and worked a variety of jobs such as a stenographer, copy writer, journalist, movie extra, and night club hostess before becoming a full time writer. Disney published her first mystery, Death in the Back Seat, in 1936, followed by eight more crime novels over the next 13 years. She married Milton MacKaye in the 1940s, and created a marriage advice column a few years later called "Can This Marriage Be Saved" that ran in the Ladies Home Journal for 30 years under her real name, Dorothy Disney MacKaye. She died September 5, 1992 in Guilford, Connecticut.