Mark McShane was an Australian author of satire, suspense novels, and crime fiction. Born in Sydney to a family with Gypsy roots, he traveled the world for the first three decades of his life. In 1960, he settled on the island of Mallorca, in the Mediterranean, and decided to write fiction. His most well known characters are the eccentric Norman Pink, and Appleton Porter, an unlikely spy whose often comic adventures McShane chronicled under the pseudonym Marc Lovell.