Being a writer is a funny business. You work alone most of the time. Sometimes that work just

involves staring blankly into space. And even once your project is finally released to the

world, it can be hard to gauge if you've done well. Some would say that just getting a book published

at all is an achievement, but there are so many other potential benchmarks that the waters get a

little muddy. What was the advance? Did it sell? Is there going to be a sequel? Is anyone

translating it? Did you win awards? It's easy to get a bit lost among it all.

There is one near universal milestone for a writer though, that everyone understands as a sign that you've made it, and that's having your book adapted for the screen. The process is so convoluted and expensive that it's honestly a miracle that anything ever gets made.

So if your book is thus chosen,

it means you've ascended to a new level as a writer. Or at least, that's the popular assumption.

Dorothy Alsayers felt differently. In the mid-1930s, when she was arguably at the height of her powers

as a detective novelist, she worked on a cinematic outing for Lord Peter Wimsy.

It was the next logical step for such a popular and beloved character,

except his creator hated the results so much

that she vowed never to dabble in film ever again.

This is the story of The Silent Passenger.

Welcome to She Done It. I'm Caroline Crampton. The 1930s was a very busy time for Dorothy Alsatius.

She had finally handed in her notice at her full-time job, the advertising agency Benson's,

in August of 1929, in order to write full-time.

And as anyone who has left full-time employment for the freelance life knows,

the anxiety about where the next bit of money is going to come from is hard to quell.

She worked furiously through the next few years,

putting out at least a detective novel a year, as well as short stories, and increasingly as the decade went on, plays a non-fiction too.

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