Sat 14 Aug 2010
A Review by Curt Evans: MIGNON G. EBERHART – The Glass Slipper.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[8] Comments
MIGNON G. EBERHART – The Glass Slipper. Doubleday Doran & Co., hardcover, 1938. Paperback reprints include: Century #35, 1945 (digest-sized); Popular Library 60-2182, 1965.
Poor Rue Hatterick. Sure, Rue was the night nurse for beautiful, rich Crystal Hatterick, wife of the brilliant Chicago surgeon Brule Hatterick. Sure, a few months after Crystal’s sudden death Rue married Brule.
Sure, someone is now writing letters to the police telling them Crystal was poisoned. Sure, Crystal’s former day nurse, who seems to know something about Crystal’s death, suddenly expires while having tea with Rue. Sure, Rue has a bag of potentially lethal medicine in her closet, left over from her nursing days.
Are those any reasons for the nasty police to suspect sweet and innocent Rue of MURDER?!!
With the publication of her ninth mystery novel, Fair Warning (1936), Mignon Eberhart hit upon a lucrative mystery recipe that was to last her for over fifty years, with only minor variations.
Take a young, pretty, nervous, motherless and fatherless girl, plunge her into a triangular love relationship with two men (one usually a husband or husband-to-be), and add a motherly older woman (an aunt or such like), a beautiful, more sophisticated, snotty-bitch female rival, an opulent yet rather shadowy and creepy mansion, a half-dozen or servants, some frightening policemen and a murder or two and you have a delightful, if a bit predictable, souffle a la Mignon.
By The Glass Slipper, Eberhart’s third mystery novel after Fair Warning, the taste indeed has become familiar, but the dish still goes down lightly and smoothly. It’s an enjoyable enough read, with a teasing bit of the bizarre that is something out of Ellery Queen or John Dickson Carr (the murder victims all have hands that have turned green).
But there’s really no way for the reader fairly to deduce the criminal (though s/he may guess it on GA mystery aesthetic principles), unlike with some of Eberhart’s earlier books. So only a B for this one.
Previously reviewed on this blog:
Woman on the Roof (by Steve Lewis)
Film: The Patient in Room 18 (by Steve Lewis)
August 14th, 2010 at 8:13 pm
Agreed, not her best, and certainly not fair play, but a good example of why Eberhart remained popular for years, sticking to her formula and working just enough variation in locale and plot to keep her loyal readers coming back again and again.
And I’ll confess there are times I’m in the mood for this kind of predictable but attractive suspense novel, and few did them better — or half as well — as Eberhart.
Certainly she wrote to formula, but seldom was simply formulaic. Considering she started in the shadow of Mary Roberts Rinehart she had a long and fruitful run.
August 15th, 2010 at 2:15 am
She was very competent at what she did, I just wish she would have varied the formula a bit more over the decades. I find I tend to lose interest in her post-war books, because it’s all now so familiar (and I miss the thirties settings).
As it is, the most significant variations in her books are the rather unusual names of her characters (in this one, Rue, Crystal and Brule). I wrote a pastiche of Eberhart earlier this year where I called her heroine Creme Brulee (setting: a decayed Louisiana plantation house, of course!).
August 15th, 2010 at 6:49 am
The only Eberhart I’ve read is the Crippen & Landru story collection from a couple of years ago. Not bad, but it certainly did not make me want to rush out and get more of her books.
August 15th, 2010 at 10:19 am
Other than some of the Sarah Keate books, I think most readers would at least enjoy THE HOUSE OF THE ROOF. There are others I liked a good deal at the time — with the caveat that I agree with Curt in regard to the sameness of plot.
But then I always liked Phylis Whitney too, so maybe I just liked the colorful settings and suspense aspect. Eberhart isn’t as good as Charlotte Armstrong or Margaret Millar (the latter a much more serious and important writer), but I wonder if they would have had the market they did if she hadn’t opened the way?
But in the right mood, when I didn’t want to stretch, and just wanted to read a good suspense novel with a decent mystery element, attractive settings, and well drawn (if cliched) characters I could always count on Eberhart. Her books are a bit like sorbet, they are good for cleansing the palate between more challenging reads.
How big was Eberhart? Well, I’ve recently been reading the big collection of all the NEW YORKER cartoons over most of the 20th Century, and by my count Eberhart is dead even with Ellery Queen and Agatha Christie as the mystery writer most often named in the punchline, including one in which a middle aged matron asks a bookseller: “Is Mignon G. Eberhart still using poison?”
August 16th, 2010 at 1:38 am
Yeah, Eberhart was very popular, especially with her serializations. She made a lot of money. I think she was the sort of writer Chandler may have had in my mind with his denunciations of the slicks. Her books are very much of a pattern (after she shifts away from the Nurse Keate tales, which themselves resembled Rinehart), with, invariably, a young heroine torn between two men and threatened by a female rival and love ultimately conquering all obstacles (they’re really love stories with murders), but she is readable.
In her earlier books there is some real clueing, which I think she tended to abandon later on in favor of pure suspense. She even had the same police detective in post-Keate books and he was an interesting character.
She’s often compared to Eberhart, but her books are more modern. After Nurse Keate she abandoned the quasi-Victorian, peppery spinster of a certain age so closely associated with the Rinehart school. The love element gets played up much more, for good or ill.
Ultimately I think writing for slicks made her work less than it could have been. I think she had potential to be a more interesting writer than she is. But I find her enjoyable at times and I think she’s a pretty significant player in the genre, one who played a key role in undermining the interest among women readers especially in puzzle and helping to give rise to the whole later suspense phenomenon that was so pronounced in the 1950s.
August 17th, 2010 at 10:50 am
Curt
I agree (as usual), and always thought that Eberhart was probably important to the later ‘Gothic’ craze to some extent. I think why I kept going back and reading her, was because, as you say, there are hints there of a better writer that never quite breaks out.
You probably wouldn’t want to read many Eberhart’s in a row, but reading one once in a while she generally delivered consistently good books, and she did have a gift for suspense and setting, and the romance was no more intrusive and generally better handled than some of those in the puzzle genre.
Re the puzzle element, there was a sort of reaction at the end of the War to the whole Golden Age and a sudden flowering of ‘suspense novelists’ who didn’t seem particularly interested in the detective element and certainly Eberhart was likely the most important writer in that group, though Joseph Shearing (Marjorie Bowen), Marjorie Carpenter, Charlotte Armstrong, Ethel Lina White, Elzabeth Saxnay Holding, and others contributed.
It may just be that Eberhart created a new genre to some extent when she went beyond that Rinehart influence and took it in a new more modern direction. The same thing was happening with male writers in a tougher vein following the lines of Cornell Woolrich.
And it’s no accident that a lot of these books read a good deal like a Hitchcock film or some of the more romantic noir films like THE RECKLESS MOMENT, CAUGHT, or LIGHTNING STRIKES TWICE. There is a real flowering of the suspense genre in this era that eventually seemed to divide into the paperback original category for men (MacDonald, Williams, Miller, Goodis) and the Gothic for women, with a few variations in the international side (another place Eberhart touched on) with MacInnes, Albrand, Gainham, and Anthony, and straight suspense writers like Millar.
It’s surprising how often Eberhart seemed to be there first.
August 17th, 2010 at 4:28 pm
Yeah, it’s really quite striking how many of the women writers are moving into “suspense” in the 1940s. I think Eberhart was quite important in that regard, most obviously in the U. S. but also in U. K. She was published by Collins Crime Club from about 1936 onward and she was called the “Atmosphere Queen.”
American gets credit for the hardboiled revolution, but it had its variant with Eberhart and the women writers. They seem linked in that they put greater emphasis on emotion and sensation and less on cerebration. Also the police often are seen as menaces, not friends. Of course in Eberhart love conquers all and wealth and consumerism is glamorized (the slicks influence) in a way that probably turned Chandler’s stomach, but then he could be rather sour at times! He liked Holding though (she seems more a forerunner of Highsmith) and praised Armstrong’s Mischief.
August 26th, 2010 at 8:42 pm
[…] Comment: Also by Mignon G. Eberhart and previously reviewed by Curt on this blog: The Glass Slipper. […]