Mabel Seeley

Mabel Seeley (née Hodnefield; March 25, 1903 – June 9, 1991) was an American mystery writer.

Early life Seeley was born March 25, 1903, in Herman, Minnesota.

Her family moved to St. Paul in 1920 where she attended Mechanic Arts High School. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of Minnesota. At the university, she found inspiration for her writing career from Mary Ellen Chase, who was then teaching English there.

Writing career In 1926 she married fellow student Kenneth Seeley and they moved to Chicago, where she wrote advertising copy for a department store. This experience she used as background of the heroine in her first book, The Listening House. The Seeleys returned to Minnesota for medical treatment when Ken contracted tuberculosis, but they later divorced. In the late 1940s she and her son Gregory moved to Colorado.

All of her books with the exception of "Eleven Came Back" were set in Minnesota, and Seeley took pains to capture her Midwestern setting, including visiting a North Shore lake at nighttime to capture an eerie feeling for her book The Crying Sisters. St. Paul literary critic James Gray called her "a high priestess in the cult of murder as a fine art." The Minnesota newspaper St. Cloud Times called her "one of the best mystery writers in the United States" in a 1942 article. In 1939, The Saturday Review of Literature named The Crying Sisters the best mystery of the year. The Stranger Beside Me (1951) The Whistling Shadow (also published as The Blonde with the Deadly Past) (1954) ——————— Bibliography notes