Isabel Egenton Ostrander (1883-1924) was a mystery writer of the early twentieth century who used her own name and the pseudonyms 'Robert Orr Chipperfield', 'David Fox', and 'Douglas Grant'.
She was born in New York City to Thomas E. Ostrander and Harriet Elizabeth Bradbrook. Her Ostrander pedigree goes back to seventeenth-century Kingston, New York. She married songwriter Arthur Lamb in June 1907 and filed for divorce less than a year later.
Ostrander is also one of the creator the first blind detective which has become a sub-genre in detective fiction.
Her 1915 novel At One-Thirty, introduces her detective Damon Gaunt but there is speculation that there was an earlier short story that saw magazine publication but was lost. (Blind detective Thornley Colton appeared in some short stories in People's Ideal Fiction Magazine in early 1913 that weren't collected in book form until 1915, while Max Carrados by Ernest Bramah reached the periodicals in 1913, but anthologization in 1914. In no case is bibliography complete for periodicals, and either might be the first, though Max Carrados was the first in book publication).
In the 1920s, Ostrander was notable enough that Agatha Christie parodied her in her Tommy and Tuppence anthology, Partners in Crime. Tommy and Tuppence can be seen to be modelling their detective skills after Ostrander's characters, McCarty and Riordan.
