Barbara Comfort

Born in 1916 in Nyack, New York, Barbara Comfort moved to Boston as a child, then at age eight to Englewood, New Jersey. But her real center was Greenwich Village, where she lived for a while in her parents’ home on Washington Square, then her own place on Charlton Street. As a landscape and portrait painter, she attended the National Academy of Arts, and in France the Ecole des Beaux-Arts at Fontainebleau.

In 1981 Comfort started her own press, Landgrove Press, with several friends. They offered a series of limited edition linoleum prints and also the first of Comfort’s mystery books, quickly becoming a series that was picked up by Foul Play Press and is still in print via Norton, which now owns Foul Play. This first mystery was “The Vermont Village Murder,” introducing Liz Bell, a newcomer in a Vermont town threatened by a developer (a timeless plot!). “The Green Mountain Murder” followed a similar thread and settled Liz into the state.

With “Phoebe’s Knee,” in 1986, Comfort developed a senior character, about 65 years old, Tish McWhinney, an artist and generally inquisitive friend. “Grave Consequences” (1989), “The Cashmere Kid” (1993), “Elusive Quarry” (1995), and “A Pair for the Queen” (1998) took Tish through more adventures. The latest in the series, “At Loggerheads,” came out as a print-on-demand book through XLibris in 2002. Of all the books, only the first printing of “Grave Consequences” featured artwork by the author on the cover; she was busy writing, and let others take over some of the publication details.