Patricia Carlon (1927-2002) was an Australian crime writer whose fourteen novels were originally published in the UK in the 1960s. Her best known titles include The Unquiet Night, The Whispering Wall and The Souvenir.

Her books went through a period of obscurity before being ‘rediscovered’ by an American publisher in a London mystery bookshop, and she remained unpublished in her native Australia until the late 1990s. Patricia also wrote short stories, romance novels and magazine serials under a variety of pseudonyms, but it is for her tightly-plotted psychological thrillers that she is best remembered.

It was only after her death that it became known that Patricia had been profoundly deaf since the age of eleven, a revelation that casts a fresh light on the themes of isolation and fear explored in her fiction. British and American reviewers have likened her to crime luminaries such as Hitchcock, Highsmith and Rendell.