The Place and Space of Mignon G. Eberhart by Rick Cypert
When I think of Mignon Eberhart and her prodigious canon of work (59 novels, many, many published short stories, and even a couple of Broadway plays!), the Greek word topos comes to mind. And Eberhart certainly had a sense of her literary topography—a fact recognized by no less than Gertrude Stein.
Stein, who met the young author in Chicago in the mid-1930s during her Lectures in America tour, read a couple of Eberhart mysteries and commented in a letter on the young author’s sense and use of space in her plotting.
Certainly Eberhart had plenty of occasions for “research” on various kinds of locales. During a health bout in her college years, she had time to imagine how the steady cadence of hospital life, even when death occurs, might be thrown into confusion, if murder were the cause. In her early married days, accompanying her husband, an engineer with the roads department, around Nebraska, she quickly recognized the ways in which a windswept prairie could act as an agent of terror.
After achieving some financial success with her early work, Eberhart found a new inspirational playground in southern France, exploiting the full potential of its howling Mistral. While most of her adult life would be spent in Chicago or on the East Coast (Manhattan, Connecticut, even rural New Jersey), Eberhart also lived in war-time Washington D.C. and in Florida. Some of her travels included Nevada (at a divorce ranch), California (northern and southern), Mexico, and Jamaica. Each place provided Eberhart with new fodder for her creative output.
The places did not so much offer opportunity for innovative types of murder—though a few occur—as a chance to foreground setting as a character, animating and intensifying it, almost as a complementary foil to the murderer. Thus, to cite only a few examples: in Wolf in Man’s Clothing, one must attend to the grounds of an estate in the Berkshires; in House of Storm, to the Caribbean island home; in Postmark Murder to a crowded downtown department store (after reading this novel, I scarcely was able to visit Marshall-Fields without looking over my shoulder); and in The Chiffon Scarf to the site of an airplane crash.
Beyond setting, two of Eberhart’s most enduring characters are included in MysteriousPress.com’s release of 13 (well-chosen!) Eberhart works: Nurse Sarah Keate (Wolf in Man’s Clothing) and mystery writer Susan Dare (The Cases of Susan Dare). The acerbic Nurse Keate, of course, was the mainstay protagonist of Eberhart’s earliest novels. Susan Dare, who only appeared in Eberhart short stories, pre-figured by sixty years the character of Jessica Fletcher (in the television series Murder, She Wrote), in profession, if not age. The novel featuring Keate, as well as the collection of Dare short stories, will surely prompt readers to seek out more.
When writing Eberhart’s biography, I read with particular interest, her correspondence with her agent and editors about the publishing process, specifically her likes and dislikes. For example, she was greatly disappointed by the first edition jacket of The Hangman’s Whip.
I feel confident, however, that she would have been delighted with the MysteriousPress.com's choice of her works to release, and, especially, the cover art for each. The elegant script font for her name, the stylish human figure silhouettes, and the well-paired snapshots floating across the covers all nicely capture time, theme, and place, as well as the style and self-image of Mignon G. Eberhart.
Rick Cypert is a Professor of English at Nebraska Wesleyan University. He has written biographies of Charlotte Armstrong and Mignon G. Eberhart (Susquehanna University Press), as well as edited short story collections of these two authors for Crippen & Landru, the Armstrong collection forthcoming.
