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MABEL SEELEY wrote seven mysteries between 1938 and 1954, all of them
wonderful period pieces set in the Midwest. Her books received rave reviews when
they were first published in New York, and they remain every bit as good today.
The Crying Sisters was Mabel’s second book, written in 1939
when she was thirty-six years old. She had already spent ten years writing
advertising copy when, in 1936, she "retired from a profession paced too
fast for me, determined never to put pencil to yellow paper again." The
next year she was at work on her first novel, The Listening House,
which brought her immediate critical and popular success.
In The Crying Sisters, a "Crime Club Selection," the
author sets the atmosphere and characters for this compelling story in her
opening words: "I still pinch myself and say it isn’t true. I still wake
at night to reach for the tangible proof within touch of my hand. Because what
happened to me last August went so far outside anything I’d known all the rest
of my life that even while it was going on I often thought I must be imagining.
"On one day I was Janet Ruell, a respectable small-town librarian,
driving north in my new car from Eldreth, Minnesota, for the first vacation I’d
ever taken without my mother. My life had been openly humdrum and secretly
desperate—the way life in a small town is for a girl who’s still unmarried
at twenty-nine. And then the next day I was agreeing to go to an unknown resort
under conditions which—well, Eldreth would have looked at them slant-eyed.
"Agreeing to go. There’s no getting away from the fact that I went of
my own free choice. I went of my volition into those days when I heard death
crying in the night, when I saw it indicated by a plantain leaf and discovered
in a plaything, when I saw it rising in a muddy bundle from the lake. The time
was to come when I felt myself living in the very house of death and eating at
its table. And in the end . . .
"I wonder if I’d have had the courage to take what Steve Corbett
offered me if I’d had premonitions."
"Beautifully told by a writer who is expert at finding horror in
commonplace settings. Recommended for highest honors." —The New
Yorker
"Mabel Seeley is a master at creating shivery atmosphere. In her latest
. . . she quite outdoes not only herself but most of her contemporaries in the
spook business." —Boston Transcript
"The Crying Sisters is the Crime Club selection for this month, and it
is an excellent mystery novel of the 'atmospheric' type. The story is involved,
and sometimes it moves slowly. But it holds its interest from the beginning as
it rises in crescendo toward climax." —The New York Times
"Mystery-melodrama adroitly handled, with killer's surprising identity
revealed in as spectacular a climax as you'll meet in moons. Grand." —Saturday
Review of Literature
This reprint series of Mabel Seeley mysteries from the Afton Historical
Society Press also includes:
The Chuckling Fingers (1941)
hardcover with dustjacket, ISBN 1-890434-08-6 $24.00
The Beckoning Door (1950)
hardcover with dustjacket, ISBN 1-890434-07-8 $24.00
The Whistling Shadow (1954)
hardcover with dustjacket, ISBN 1-890434-16-7 $24.00
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