The late Carol Houlihan Flynn has published a mystery novel, Washed in the Blood, (Putnam 1983) and - in her other life as an English professor - several academic works, including The Body in Swift and Defoe (Cambridge 2005), and Samuel Richardson, a Man of Letters (Princeton 1982).

She was for many years Professor of English at Tufts University, in Massachusetts.

Raised in Chicago, she lived in Boston and then Maine.