Sarah Caudwell, who has died of cancer aged 60, was a barrister who turned to crime writing when she ran out of good crime novels to read. It was an open secret that her full name was Sarah Caudwell Cockburn; her father was the writer Claud, while her mother, the journalist and actress Jean Ross, was generally regarded as the model for Sally Bowles in Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye To Berlin - although Jean always repudiated the comparison on the grounds that, unlike herself, Sally was frivolous and not interested in politics.
Sarah's first book was Adonis Murdered (1981), in which Julia, an absent-minded barrister, lures a handsome young tax inspector - later foully murdered - to her hotel room in Venice. Julia is mistakenly arrested for the crime and sends wordy and witty letters to her Lincoln's Inn friends. The book was a success, particularly in America, where it was regarded as quintessentially English; it was subsequently translated into Swedish and Japanese.
It is no coincidence that the titles of all Sarah's books contain classical references. She was educated at Aberdeen high school for girls and the local university, where she read Latin and ancient Greek. She then read law at St Anne's College, Oxford, where she was a fast-talking undergraduate, puffing at her pipe and sometimes composing humorous verse.
One such occasion began with a party in Balliol College, Oxford, where she made overtures to a don whom she considered to have "a good profile". He resisted her efforts to further the acquaintance. But the don, who lectured in English, was known for his habit of watching television and, a few days later, Sarah sent him a verse:
I cast aside my modesty, I laid aside my shame/ And on my knees I offered love - or something much the same/ You brushed my powder from your sleeve, with elegant precision/ And murmured: "Conversation is killing television."
In the early 1960s, Oxford was still a surprisingly reactionary place; women, for example, were not allowed to become members of the university debating society, the Oxford Union. Encouraged by Sarah, who was watching from the public gallery, Rose Dugdale, who later became rather more notorious for her links with the Provisional IRA, and I dressed up as men and walked into the debating chamber to draw attention to the anomaly.
Our move attracted a lot of publicity, but didn't result in a change in the rules, so we canvassed for support and finally got the restrictions removed. Then the problem was who would speak. Few women had experience of debating, but Sarah had some skills from her Aberdeen days. So, as one of the first women to be invited to participate in a debate - as a member of the union rather than as a guest - she spoke and made everybody laugh.
Called to the Bar in 1965, she left in the mid-1970s to become deputy legal adviser to the trust division of Lloyd's Bank. But it was her life as a junior chancery barrister that formed the basis of her books, and several of her friends from those days can be discerned, thinly disguised, among her fictional characters.
When doing the groundwork for her books, Sarah favoured the direct approach. Once on a visit to Jersey, she disconcerted bystanders by sitting at the bar of her hotel, puffing at her pipe and demanding, "Where in Jersey could I lure someone to his death, preferably on a beach?" She was researching The Sirens Sang Of Murder, a story of treachery, tax-planning and witchcraft partly set in the Channel Islands, and published in 1989.
For many years Sarah lived in Barnes, near the Thames, in south-west London, with her mother and aunt, Peggy. The neighbourhood figured in her second book, The Shortest Way To Hades, as the location for a suspicious death among spectators on boat race day.
Her latest book, The Sibyl In Her Grave, the story of a sleepy Sussex village riven by murder and rumours of insider dealing, is due to be published in America by Delacorte Press in July.
Sarah remained witty and optimistic to the end. She is survived by her aunt Clare Hughes (Billee) and by her half-brothers Alexander, Andrew and Patrick Cockburn.
Sarah Caudwell, barrister and writer, born May 27 1939; died 28 January 2000