About Mabel
Mabel Seeley (née Hodnefield) (March 25, 1903 Herman, Minnesota – 1991) was an American mystery writer who wrote ten novels between 1938 and 1954, all period pieces set in the Midwest. Often referred to as “the Mistress of Mystery,” Seeley’s work included the acclaimed The Crying Sisters (1939) and seven other mysteries. In the 30’s and 40’s, she was heralded as the most popular crime writer of the century, receiving rave reviews from such arbiters of literary fashion as the New York Times, the Saturday Review and the New Yorker, as well as the Mystery of the Year award in 1941 for The Chuckling Fingers. Literary critic James Gray once described her as “a high priestess in the cult of murder as a fine art.” Her novels were published by Doubleday and HarpersCollins and distributed globally by The Crime Club. She was also an early member of the Mystery Writers of America and served on its first board of directors.
Early Years
Seeley’s family moved to St. Paul in 1920 when her father, a teacher, got a job at the Minnesota Historical Society. Her mother was a natural storyteller, “so I started life with a book in my hand and well-said words in my ears,” she once wrote. Seeley attended Mechanic Arts High School and was encouraged to write by an English teacher. As a result, she contributed some work to the school’s literary magazine. Mabel once wrote about her decision to get serious about writing. She was crossing a busy street, was almost hit by a speeding car, and thought, “Here I’m going to die and I haven’t written any books.” She would eventually pen ten titles, eight of them mysteries, all set in Minnesota.
Seeley won a St. Paul College scholarship and graduated summa cum laude with honors from the University of Minnesota in 1926. She married fellow student Kenneth Seeley and they moved to Chicago. This was short lived as her husband was diagnosed with tuberculosis and they move to the woods of Minnesota where she became a mother to their son, Gregory. Their marriage was difficult and they divorced. Mabel moved back to the city where she began writing advertising copy for a department store; an experience she used as background for the heroine in her first novel. After seven years she quit, planning never again to write. But within a year, she had started The Listening House (1938), a mystery set in a seedy St. Paul roaming house.
“The hall wasn’t inviting. It smelled of old gas. It smelled of animals confined to cellars. The ghosts of long-fried dinners, the acridity of long-burned cigarettes haunted the air that was a thicker, foggier dark than the gray day outside; a murk that might have been the grime of the outside walls floated loose and suspended in the hall. Ahead a rectangle of lighter gray showed the door of a room on the right, farther ahead on the right glowered a doorway into pitch-blackness.”
Storytelling
To create believable settings, Seeley did field work. While writing The Crying Sisters (1939), she ran through fields of tall, dry grass to see how grasshoppers responded when startled. For The Whispering Cup (1940), she spent time at her uncle’s grain elevator to experience the wind whistling in the bins and to hear the talk of farmers.
Seeley was especially gifted at creating moods that are a closer kin to current crime novels than the traditional romantic-suspense genre. Each novel is amazingly contemporary and realistic, told from a conversational, first-person point of view with natural proses that are surprisingly modern in tone.
Dialog was another Seeley strength, and some of the best takes place between the Seeley heroine and the man she will land on the last page. Though surrounded by dark forces and stalked by murderers, there is always an easy give and take between these two, characterized by bracing honesty and frequent laughs.
Character development was very important to Mabel. Unlike such female crime writer contemporaries as Agatha Christie, Delores Hitchens and Leigh Brackett, Seeley's protagonists were never private investigators or amateur sleuths, but ordinary, self-reliant mid-western women—women caught in extraordinary circumstances and fighting to save those they love—as well as themselves. They were working middle-class woman: a librarian, a copywriter, a stenographer. These characters are uniquely American: sassy, tough-minded, loyal, independent. A Seeley woman wouldn't know what to do with a French Count if she fell over one in her native Minnesota woods. She doesn't pack a gat. A fedora is not something she accessorizes comfortably. And despite the chauvinistic attitudes of some of the Seeley male characters, the Seeley protagonist manages to hold her ground and still get the guy. Seeley empathized with one of her creations so much that she couldn’t write for two weeks after killing her off. Mabel even kept a mirror close at hand while writing to see how to describe different facial expressions during various emotions.
Amongst her heroines, Seeley also showcased Midwesterners as highly individual characters within their regional stereotypes. Seeley's slow-talking Norwegian-Americans, mercurial French-Canadians, and ironic heroines all contribute to the sense of the regionally familiar that Seeley consciously worked to establish. She shows Midwesterners at routine jobs in grain elevators (The Whispering Cup (1940)) and small-town hospitals (The Beckoning Door (1950)), between jobs in seedy rooming houses (The Listening House (1938)), and out of their element in Wyoming (Eleven Came Back (1943)) and Georgia (The Whistling Shadow (1954)). This identification with a specific geographic region and its heritage paves the way for the special brand of horror and suspense that Seeley develops in her stories of ordinary people caught up in phenomenon.
The background against which Seeley casts her crimes is solidly middle class, and the predominant work ethic colors the manner in which Seeley's money-oriented crimes are viewed: criminals are those who take economic power from others, while positively viewed characters are those who either work to regain what was theirs or acquire additional property or status. Seeley includes people under proprietary claims, so that murders with economic implications originate in dominating love that turns into jealous and possessive obsession. This money-love nexus can be viewed positively (as when the heroine gets man and money in The Listening House (1938)) or negatively (as when the villain loses girl and money in The Beckoning Door (1950)). In the well-ordered, familiar world of Seeley's detective fiction, crime and murder are intrusions which let themselves be felt in the economic and romantic inversions which they effect.
In contrast, Seeley’s two non-detective novels, the well-received Woman of Property (1947) and the thought-provoking The Stranger Beside Me (1951), interlock strong themes of love and money. Unlike the eight mysteries, these novels rely on third person narration, and in them, Seeley portrays particularly sensitive women who are very different from her wisecracking detective fiction heroines. For Frieda in Woman of Property (1947) and Christine in The Stranger Beside Me (1951), economic success does not go hand in hand with success in marriage. Both novels present sexual incompatibility, men who are not particularly successful at their work, families marred by psychic if not physical abuse, and women who strive for success in what is very obviously a man's world. It is a far cry from the world of Seeley's detective fiction, where the clever woman solves crimes as she falls in love with a man who considerately encourages her in her work.
Seeley always worked hard to improve her novels. “The only time I’m pleased with myself,” she said, “is when I’m exhausted and shaking from having written too much.”
In the late 1940’s, Mabel and her son Gregory moved to California. While promoting The Whistling Shadow (1954), she met the lawyer Henry Ross. They married two years later, settling down in New Jersey. She never wrote another novel.
Mabel Seeley died on June 9, 1991. At that time, her husband told a Pioneer Press columnist that she had quit writing to devote time to the marriage. Mabel never offered an explanation for the end of her active writing career, so it still remains—a mystery.
Later Years