Anne Austin (September 13, 1895 – ?) was an American journalist and writer of romance and mystery novels.
Anne Austin was born in Waco, Texas. She married Charles Benson in 1912, whom she divorced soon after the birth of their child, Ellen Elizabeth. In 1922, she married Stewart Edmund Book (whom she also divorced). From 1912 to 1914 she attended Baylor University. Her first occupation was as a high school teacher in Marfa and Moody, Texas. She then worked as a feature and fiction writer and a dramatic critic for the Waco Morning News, the Kansas City Post, and other periodicals. From 1926 to 1930, she wrote for Newspaper Enterprise Association (NEA Service), where she produced several serialized romance novels that were later published as books. In 1934, one of them was turned into the movie A Wicked Woman.
In 1929, Austin's first mystery novel The Black Pigeon was serialized in newspapers and subsequently published as a book. The story, written in the heyday of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, was a success and translated into several languages (e.g., German and French), which led to five more mystery novels featuring the investigator James "Bonnie" Dundee.
Starting in 1933, Austin was under contract as a writer at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios; in 1939, she was living in Hollywood, California. After the 1930s, she published no more books and seems to have disappeared entirely from the public; nothing is known about her further life.
Austin's only child, Ellen Elizabeth Benson (born 1913 in Waco, Texas), was measured with an I.Q. of 214 at the age of 8, then the highest ever recorded, and became a celebrity. At 13, during her sophomore year at Barnard College in New York City, she published a book of her own, The Younger Generation. In a series of newspaper articles, Austin described how she managed to support her child while being a single working mother, unusual at the time.
Resurrected Press reissued all of Austin's mystery novels between 2012 and 2015.