M.M. Kaye

Mary Margaret ('Mollie') Kaye (21 August 1908 – 29 January 2004) was a British writer. Her most famous book is The Far Pavilions (1978). M. M. Kaye was born in Simla, British India, and lived in Oakland, Shimla, a heritage property from 1915 to 1918. She was the elder daughter and one of three children born to Sir Cecil Kaye and his wife, Margaret Sarah Bryson. Cecil Kaye was an intelligence officer in the Indian Army. M. M. Kaye's grandfather, brother, and husband all served the British Raj. 

Her grandfather's cousin, Sir John William Kaye, wrote the standard accounts of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the First Afghan War. At 10, Mollie Kaye, as she was then known, was sent to England to attend boarding school. She subsequently studied children's book illustrations and earned money by designing Christmas cards. 

In 1926, she briefly returned to live with her family in India. Still, after her father's death, she was displeased by her mother's pressure to find a junior officer to marry and so returned to England, living in London on a small pension based on her late father's army career, augmented first by earnings from illustrating children's books and from 1937 from the publication of children's books written by Kaye. 

Her first adult novel, Six Bars at Seven, published in 1940, was a thriller that Kaye had been moved to write by regularly reading that type of book from the Fourpenny Library: "Most of the stuff I was reading was total rubbish, and I used to think I couldn't write worse. So I sat down and wrote one." The £64 that she received for Six Bars at Seven enabled Kaye to return to Simla, where she lived with her married sister, Dorothy Elizabeth Pardey. 

In June 1941, Kaye met her future husband. The British Indian Army officer, Godfrey John Hamilton, was four years her junior and reportedly proposed to Kaye on five days' acquaintance. Kaye was pregnant with the couple's second child when she and Hamilton were able to marry on Armistice Day 1945, Hamilton's first marriage having been dissolved. After her second child's 1946 birth, Kaye returned to writing. (Hamilton's first wife, Mary Penelope Colthurst, lived in Ireland with the couple's daughter. 

Kaye would later state of her affair with Hamilton, "We just couldn't wait. Had it been peacetime, I wouldn't have done it because of how I had been brought up. But these were the pressures of war".) After the 1947 dissolution of the British Indian Army because India achieved independence, Hamilton had transferred to the British Army, where his career necessitated him and his family to relocate 27 times over the next 29 years, with Kaye using several of those locales in a series of crime novels.

That inaugurated the rise of the pen name M. M. Kaye, the writer's previous published works having been credited to Mollie Kaye. Kaye's literary agent was Paul Scott, an army officer in India who would find fame as the author of The Raj Quartet. With Scott's encouragement, Kaye wrote her first historical epic of India, Shadow of the Moon, published in 1957. The focal background of Shadow of the Moon is the Sepoy Mutiny with which Kaye had been familiarised, but stories heard as a child from her family's native servants. 

That early interest was reinforced in the mid-1950s when Kaye, on a visit to friends in India, chanced on some transcripts of trials attendant on the Sepoy Mutiny in a shed on her friends' property. Kaye would later state her displeasure over the original published version of Shadow of the Moon being edited without her knowledge, with sections focused on action rather than romance being largely deleted.