Janice, this mystery author reminds me of another, not well know, but maybe another mystery author story for you. Kurban Said wrote a novel called The Girl from the Golden Horn. In my review of it on Goodreads I wrote "There's a good deal of mystery about the author who wrote this book and one other, Ali and Nino. The consensus is that the author’s name is a pen name for a male-female team: an Austrian countess, Elfriede Ehrenfels, and a Muslim man named Essad Bey. But Essad Bey was a name taken by a Jewish man from Azerbaijani named Lev Nussimbaum, born in Baku in 1905. Nussimbaum likely had to hide his Jewish identity because his books were published in Germany in the 1930s." You can read more about him on Wiki. Jim