My aunt, Celia Fremlin, who has died at the age of 94, was a writer of mystery novels. Her first, The Hours Before Dawn, published in 1958, won a Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe award and with it she launched her own special style of mystery and horror, combined with evocative descriptions of married women's lives in the 1950s. In addition to her 16 novels, the last published in 1994, she wrote short stories, poetry and articles and was a member of her local writers' circle in Hampstead, north London.
She was born in Kingsbury, Middlesex, to Heaver Fremlin, a doctor, and his wife Margaret. Celia was educated at Berkhamsted school for girls, Hertfordshire, and Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied classics. After her mother died in 1931, she was expected to look after her father, but she interspersed this with jobs in domestic service, unusual for a middle-class woman in those days, in order to "observe the peculiarities of the class structure of our society", she said. She described her experiences in her first book, The Seven Chars of Chelsea, published in 1940.
During the second world war, she was involved in Mass-Observation, an exercise in which information was gathered by the government about how British people felt about their daily lives, government and the war. As a result of this work, Celia published War Factory in collaboration with Tom Harrisson in 1943.
She had married Elia Goller in 1942; they had three children, Nicholas, Geraldine and Sylvia, and Celia threw herself into domestic life. She submitted short stories to women's magazines during the early 1950s, which resulted in a lot of rejection slips, but, as her young family grew up, she was able to find time to write her first novel.
She belonged to the Progressive League and joined in many of its activities. Those who knew her will remember her great interest in people and her unusual solutions to their problems, together with her lack of interest in money or any of the technical advances of the modern age.
Elia died in 1968 and Celia married Leslie Minchin in 1985. He died in 1999 and she lived on in Hampstead and then Bristol, predeceased by all three of her children.