Mabel Seeley's Intermodernist Crime Fiction

Abstract Minnesota writer Mabel Hodnefield Seeley (1903-1991) established herself as an important crime-fiction writer with her first four published books, The Listening House (1938), The Crying Sisters (1939), The Whispering Cup (1940), and The Chuckling Fingers (1941). Born and raised in Minnesota...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The space between (Space Between (Society)) 2023-01, Vol.19, p.1-1
Main Author: Erickson, Rosemary
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Crime fiction
Fiction
Literary criticism
Mysteries
Novels
Whispering
Women
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Summary:Abstract Minnesota writer Mabel Hodnefield Seeley (1903-1991) established herself as an important crime-fiction writer with her first four published books, The Listening House (1938), The Crying Sisters (1939), The Whispering Cup (1940), and The Chuckling Fingers (1941). Born and raised in Minnesota, she chose Minnesota settings for all but one of her novels-the western ranch of Eleven Came Back-and she conducted on-site research for each book, an indicator of a serious purpose behind her popular genre novels. Seeley's first four books-The Listening House (1938), The Crying Sisters (1939), The Whispering Cup (1940), and The Chuckling Fingers (1941)-established her reputation as a crime-fiction writer. To argue that Seeley "modernizes" a popular literary subgenre involves close attention to literary-historical placement as a historical process as well as an analysis of the novels. Instead of starting from the murder and reconstructing to one, final, pat solution (as with most detective stories), she takes us back to the beginning -to her beginning with the story-and moves forward from there" (83).
ISSN:1551-9309