Mignon G. Eberhart (1899 – 1996)

Mignonette Good (1899-1996) was born in a suburb of Lincoln, attending Nebraska Wesleyan University, where she studied English and history from 1917 to 1920. In 1923 she married Alanson C. Eberhart, a civil engineer. After working as a freelance journalist, she decided to become a full-time writer. In 1929 her first crime novel, The Patient in Room 18, was published featuring ‘Sarah Keate’, a nurse and ‘Lance O’Leary’, a police detective. This couple appeared in another four novels, While the Patient Slept (1930), The Mystery of Hunting’s End (1930), From This Dark Stairway (1931) and Murder by an Aristocrat (1932) aka Murder of My Patient. By the end of the 1930s was one of the most popular female mystery writers of America. In the Forties, she and her husband divorced. She married John Hazen Perry in 1946 but two years later she divorced him and remarried her first husband. Over the next forty years she penned over 50 novels and numerous short stories. Eight of her books, including While the Patient Slept and Hasty Wedding (1938), were adapted for film. In 1971, she received the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. She was also president of the Mystery Writers of America. Eberhart continued publishing roughly a book a year until the 1980s. Her final novel, Three Days for Emeralds, was published in 1988.

The Sarah Keate novels by Mike Grost: Eberhart began her mystery career with a series of novels featuring nurse Sarah Keate and police detective Lance O’Leary. They are not exactly a team – they keep stumbling against each other accidentally when Sarah’s nursing cases turn into murder mysteries. Sarah Keate tends to be the central character of the stories, as well as the narrator. She often takes care of helpless young male patients in a female, nurse-run world: a reversal of the social roles often prescribed for men and women of the era. None of the books is a triumph, considered as a pure puzzle plot mystery – although the locked room in The Mystery of Hunting’s End and the disappearance in From This Dark Stairway are admirable. Yet several of them have opening sections with imaginative storytelling. The first five Sarah Keate novels appeared at the start of Eberhart’s career (1929-1932); the last two followed after long intervals. There are short stories about the character, such as “The Old Man’s Diamond” (1934), which appears in Mignon G. Eberhart’s Best Mystery Stories. And more importantly, there are five short stories about Keate in Dead Yesterday (available from its publisher Crippen & Landru).

Further reading:

• Steve Lewis’ articles on Eberhart are at Mystery File and at Mystery File, which also contains a filmography.
• Curtis Evans’ article on The Pattern is at Mystery File, and on The Glass Slipper is at Mystery File.
• A mystery fiction bibliography and reviews are at the Golden Age of Detection Wiki.
• A detailed bibliography including short stories by Richard Aylesworth.

Mysterious Press has re-issued some of her books.

(Source: Facsimile Dust Jackets LLC. Doubleday The Crime Club (USA), 1932)

After a murder at the manor where she’s employed, a nurse trades her stethoscope for a magnifying glass…

When Nurse Keate arrives at the Thatcher estate to care for a man with a bullet in his shoulder, she’s told that he shot himself accidentally—but when the convalescing man is murdered soon thereafter, it becomes clear that the only “accident” was his not being fully killed the first time around. A murderer stalks the manor and yet the rest of the family isn’t the slightest bit alarmed; instead, they seem intent on concealing the crime and adding it to the other dark secrets buried deep within their mansion’s walls. Meanwhile, Nurse Keate is passed from one family member to another, each one claiming some spurious ailment requiring her expertise, realizing only too late that the family is anxious to keep her and her knowledge of the crime from leaving the premises. After another apparent murder takes place, she begins to fear that the price of this knowledge may be her life.

A thrilling mystery set in the rarified world of a wealthy Midwestern family, Murder by an Aristocrat renders its pulse-pounding suspense and puzzling crimes with eloquent prose, exemplifying why Eberhart was widely known, in her day, as “the atmosphere queen.” It is the fifth installment in the Nurse Keate series, which can be read in any order. (Source: Penzler Publishers)

Earl Derr Biggers (1884 – 1933)

Earl Derr Biggers (1884 – 1933) was an American novelist and playwright best known through adaptations of his novels, especially those featuring the Chinese-American detective Charlie Chan. The son of Robert J. and Emma E. (Derr) Biggers, he was born in Warren, Ohio, on August 24, 1884. Years later, while attending Harvard University, Biggers showed little passion for the classics, preferring instead writers such as Rudyard Kipling and Richard Harding Davis. Following his graduation from Harvard in 1907, he worked briefly for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and at Bobbs-Merrill publishers. By 1908, Biggers was hired at the Boston Traveler to write a daily humor column. Soon, however, he became that paper’s drama critic. It was at this time that he met Elanor Ladd, who would later become his wife and who would have a marked influence in his writing. Many of his plays and novels were made into movies.

His novel Seven Keys to Baldpate led to seven films of the same title (each largely forgotten) and at least two with other titles but essentially equivalent plots. George M. Cohan (better known as a songwriter, and vaudeville and Broadway song-and-dance man) adapted the novel as a stage play, which undergoes occasional revivals as of the decade of the 2000s, and the film version he later screen wrote (released in 1935) is perhaps the least forgotten of the seven films.

He is best known for the Charlie Chan novels. Chan is a fictional Chinese-Hawaiian detective reportedly created in part under inspiration from the career of Chang Apana. Chan is the hero of a number of books and dozens of movies. At first a sergeant (but later promoted) in the Honolulu Police Department, he and his wife have eleven children and live in a house on Punchbowl Hill. He is a large man but moves gracefully. Biggers lived in San Marino, California, and died in a Pasadena, California of a heart attack on 5 April 1933. He was 48.

The Charlie Chan Series: The House Without a Key (1925), The Chinese Parrot (1926), Behind That Curtain (1928), The Black Camel (1929), Charlie Chan Carries On (1930) and Keeper of the Keys (1932).

Charlie Chan is a shrewd Chinese detective on the Honolulu police force. He solves crimes by assuming that, if he can understand a man’s character, he can predict his actions in any given circumstance. He is also fond of spouting aphorisms like, “Insignificant molehill sometimes more important than conspicuous mountain”. Biggers based the character in part on Chang Apana, a real Chinese policeman who lived in Hawaii. The Chan books were popular but the cerebral crimefighter really took off as a B movie hero, with original scripts written by others after Biggers’ death. (Source: Bobb Edwards)

Further reading:

• Charlie Chan, The Enduring Detective by Marv Lachman.
• Chan, The Man by Jill Lepore 
• Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History (W. W. Norton & Company, 2010) by Yunte Huang,

Mike Grost on Earl Derr Biggers: The first Charlie Chan novel of Earl Derr Biggers, The House Without a Key (1925), shows signs of the Realist school of detective fiction, especially Freeman Wills Crofts. It has a policeman as its detective hero. It has a well described Background of Hawaii. It also explores San Francisco in one section. The plot ultimately hinges on that Croftsian staple, the alibi, although there is no “breakdown of identity”. …. Biggers explicitly created his hero Chan as a reply to the racist Yellow Peril stories that were so popular in their era, with their Oriental villains scheming to take over the world. After years of cliched movie adaptations, Charlie Chan is now frequently considered a lamentable stereotype. I am certainly not defending some of the film versions of the character. But it seems inaccurate and unjust to judge the original books by later film versions. Biggers worked hard to shatter racist stereotypes and replace them by positive images of Chinese people. He deserves credit for this, not blame. (Read the complete article here)

I read The House without a Key, the very first Chan book, last year and was also struck but its modern feel and its compassionate treatment of minority characters. I am now determined to read the remaining four books in the series. (J. F. Norris at Mystery File).

(Source: Facsimile Dust Jackets LLC.  Grosset & Dunlap (USA), 1925)

In The House Without a Key we are introduced to Chan, a corpulent father of nine, as he uses all his considerable faculties to solve the mystifying case of a murdered father and a missing jewel box. When John Winterslip is sent to Hawaii to retrieve his elderly Aunt Minerva, he fully expects to return home quickly. His Boston Brahmin roots, his successful investment business, and his family-approved fiancée are all luring him back home. Shortly after his arrival in Honolulu, however, his uncle, who was reputed to have consorted with pirates, is murdered. Detective Charlie Chan takes up the case. (Source: Bloomsbury)

The House Without a Key has been reviewed, among others, at Golden Age of Detection Wiki, Seeing The World Through Books, Dead Yesterday, Bitter Tea and Mystery, Classic Mysteries, The Book Decoder.