Grant Allen was a Canadian-born author born in Ontario during the year 1848. Though he spent much of his youth traveling, his family eventually settled in the United Kingdom, where he studied within the sciences before turning towards writing. Though he explored various genres, one of the most prominent of his was crime fiction, where he often wrote about women detectives and pushed boundaries within the genre through his character "Colonel Clay." Much of such work, including "Jerry Stokes" would be published in The Strand Magazine, a periodical that he published in alongside friend and fellow crime fiction author, Arthur Conan Doyle. Allen died in 1899 shortly after finishing his final novel, Hilda Wade, that of which would be posthumously released within the same magazine.