Pierre Véry (1900 - 1960) was born into a farming family in Bellon in the Charentes in South West France. He spent the first fifteen years of his life locked into this rural locality where he was able to observe the behaviour of his community at close quarters. The experience provided him with abundant material which later yielded Goupi Mains Rouges amongst a number of other novels with a rural, country town setting. He moved to Paris in 1915 and worked for ten years in various occupations including training as a racing cyclist and the merchant navy, before returning to Paris to open a second-hand bookshop.
His first detective novel 'Le Testament de Basil Crookes' was published in 1930 using the pseudonym of Toussaint-Juge. A stylish satire of the English detective novel it won the Grand Prix du Roman d'Aventures, a competition initiated by a lawyer, Pigasse, to encourage French writers to compare themselves with their foreign counterparts.

From 1930 to 1949 Véry published some 28 detective novels or romans de mystère as he preferred to call them. He said of them that his dream was to renew detective fiction by making it poetic and humorous, hence his decision to produce a series (40 were planned) in the style of Chesterton's, "The Man who was Thursday," in which 'characters will no longer be mere puppets in the service of an enigma but human beings fighting towards the truth'. Whilst he considered them detective tales they were also 'fairy tales for adults'.

He was closely associated with the cinema. Seven of his novels (including Goupi Mains Rouges) were made into films in the production of which Véry was involved, as well as being the screen writer in a number of others.