In The Chuckling Fingers, Minnesota mystery writer Mabel Seeley
(1903–1991) presents the story of the weird and strange events that beset the
Heaton family, Minnesota lumber tycoons, at their remote, pine-grown estate on
Lake Superior. But let the author introduce her story herself:
"Other people may think they’d like to live their lives over, but not
me—not if this last week is going to be in it. Out of what has just happened
at the Fingers both Jacqueline and I got something worth keeping, but Heaven
defend me from ever again having to stand helplessly by while it becomes more
and more apparent to almost everyone but me that the person I love most in the
world
is murderously insane. . . .
"I never again want to know the panic of being up against evil coming
out of a mind so much more skillful than mine that even the signs we did see—the
acid in a bride’s toilet kit, the burned matchsticks under a bed, the word
scrawled with a child’s blue chalk on a rock—all just bogged us deeper in
terror and despair. . . ."
Mabel Seeley’s story of that terror
and despair was the mystery of the year in 1941.
Mabel Seeley (1903–1991) was an enormously popular Minnesota mystery writer
from the late 1930s through the early 1950s. Her novels were published by
Doubleday in New York and distributed by The Crime Club.
Mabel Hodnefield Seeley moved to St. Paul with her family in 1920, when her
father, Jacob Hodnefield, took a job as newspaper curator at the Minnesota
Historical Society. She attended Mechanic Arts High School and graduated summa
cum laude from the University of Minnesota. After marrying Ken Seeley, Mabel
moved to Chicago, where she wrote advertising copy while her husband worked on a
master's degree. The Seeleys returned to the Twin Cities for medical treatment
when Ken contracted tuberculosis, but they later divorced. Mabel went on to
become famous for her mystery novels, and by the late 1940s she and her young
son Gregory were resettled in California.
In 1954, while in the East to promote her last book, The Whistling Shadow,
Mabel Seeley met lawyer Henry Ross whom she married two years later. When asked
many years later why his wife had stopped writing, Ross told a reporter:
"She married me. Writing is hard work, and . . . she liked being married
better. She was extremely intelligent, extremely generous, a devoted wife,
mother, and grandmother.
Cover painting by Paul S. Kramer
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