De la Torre, Lillian

Pseudonym for the American author and teacher Lillian McCue, née Bueno, and often written with all her surnames: Lillian de la Torre Bueno McCue. She has become known for three historical novels, all of them dramatizations of real crime cases that are either unsolved or where the formal solutions have been questioned. She has, however, received most attention and much praise for four collections of short detective stories with the English poet and linguist Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) as an amateur detective and his companion James Boswell as the narrator and a sort of ‘Watson’ character.