Sarah Gainham

Rachel Ames, née Stainer (London, 1 October 1915 – Petronell, Austria, 24 November 1999) was a British novelist and journalist who wrote under the pseudonym Sarah Gainham.

After an "impulsive and unsuccessful wartime liaison", in 1947 she moved to Vienna to work with the Four Power Commission, and married the journalist Antony Terry.

Terry was German correspondent for the Sunday Times, and the marriage "fell victim to his workload".

Stainer never returned to England, living in Berlin, Bonn and Trieste before returning to Vienna.

In 1956 Cyril Ray helped secure her a job as Central and Eastern Europe Correspondent for The Spectator, making a plea that she needed the money.

She soon published her first novel, Time Right Deadly (1956), a semi-autobiographical account of an unsuccessful affair.

The novel was followed by several other spy thrillers set in Europe.

Here Gainham drew on her own knowledge of Cold War spies and intrigues: Terry, hired to the Sunday Times by Ian Fleming, may have been an MI6 agent, and Gainham herself apparently researched a document 'East-West Routes for Agents', commissioned by Fleming, on how to gain access to West Berlin from East Berlin.

In 1964 her marriage to Terry was dissolved, and she married Kenneth Ames, Central European correspondent of The Economist.

Writing as Sarah Gainham (the name of her maternal great-grandmother), she reported on Germany and the German-speaking parts of Central Europe until 1966.

She is perhaps best known for her 1967 novel Night Falls on the City, the first of a trilogy about life in Vienna under Nazi rule.

Rachel Stainer was born in Islington.

After her father Tom died in World War I, the family moved to Newbury, Berkshire.

Night Falls on the City (1967), a tale of love and betrayal set in wartime Vienna, achieved significant commercial success: it topped the New York Times bestseller list for several months, and was widely translated.

It was the first novel of a trilogy, completed by A Place in the Country (1969) and Private Worlds (1971), and gave her financial security.

In 1975 Ames committed suicide, leaving Gainham alone in later life.

In 1976 she moved from Vienna to a small house in Petronell-Carnuntum, on the banks of the Danube, and became a somewhat eccentric recluse.

Her last novel was the heavily autobiographical but unsuccessful The Tiger, Life (1983).

In 1984 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

A Discursive Essay on the Presentation of Recent History in England was privately published in 1999.