Susan Moody FCIL (born 18 January 1940 at Oxford, England), is the principal pen name of Susan Elizabeth Horwood, an English novelist best known for her suspense novels.

After marrying, as her third husband, Professor John Dalgleish Donaldson, at Oxford on 5 September 2001, she became stepmother of his four children, including Mary, Queen of Denmark.^[1]

Biography

The daughter of Professor Frederick Chesney Horwood (1904–1990) and Ursula née Wheeler-Robinson (1908–1989), daughter of the Revd Henry Wheeler-Robinson DD, she grew up in Oxford, attending Headington School. She then lived in France where she met her first husband, Professor Walter Frank Bertsch (died 1971), whom she married in 1961. They moved to Tennessee where she lived for 10 years and had 2 children, before returning to Britain. She married secondly in 1972, Dr John Moody, having one son. She then studied with the Open University (BA 1978).

In 1983, Moody published her first novel, A Distant Shore, and one other historical novel under the pen name Susannah James before she turned to the genre of crime and suspense literature. More recently, she has also used the pen name Susan Madison.^[2]

Moody is a former Chairwoman of the Crime Writers' Association and has served as World President of the International Association of Crime Writers.^[3] She has been elected to the prestigious Detection Club and as a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Linguists (FCIL). Having led numerous courses on writing crime fiction, she continues to tutor creative writing courses in England, France, Australia, and Denmark.