Virginia Coffman

Virginia Coffman (1914-2005) was an American gothic-romance novelist born in San Francisco. Before turning to fiction, she worked in Hollywood as a secretary and script editor for studios including Selznick, Monogram Pictures, Hal Roach, and Howard Hughes, later settling in Reno, Nevada, where she wrote full-time while holding administrative jobs. She wrote more than a hundred novels, beginning with Moura (1959), the first of her five-book Lucifer Cove series, and continuing through titles such as The Devil's Mistress, Isle of the Undead, and The Dark Gondola, blending gothic atmosphere, historical settings, and detective-style plotting with supernatural menace. She also published under the pseudonyms Jeanne Duval, Kay Cameron, and Ann Stanfield. Coffman was active in American PenWomen and was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame in 1990.