On a blustery February day, plucky, red-headed nurse Sarah Keate takes a taxi to the gloomy, isolated Federie mansion. Her charge: to care for the wealthy aging patriarch, Jonah Federie, who has just suffered a debilitating stroke. (I know. What could go wrong?)
Right away, the situation gets dicey. It’s storming when Nurse Keate’s cab breaks down (or truthfully runs into a ditch after she pokes the careless driver with her umbrella). But ever intrepid, Keate walks the isolated road to her new place of employment in the near dark.
Just as she finally approaches the rambling old house, she comes upon a couple having an urgent conversation—an argument—about what must be done that very night. Nurse Keate stops to listen as the two go back and forth until the matter is settled on a terribly dark note: “‘Afraid? Nonsense. A Federie afraid!’ He laughed with a kind of easy scorn. ‘A Federie hand is born to fit the curve of a revolver!'”
And, so, with her gift for description and her instinct for creating atmosphere, Mignon G. Eberhart immediately immerses her readers in the gothic setting she has deftly concocted and establishes her trademark darkly cheeky, character-rich sense of suspense before we have reached page ten.
In 1930, when Nebraska author Eberhart published While the Patient Slept, her second novel, her star was already on the rise.
This was the Golden Age of mystery writing, the period between World War I and World War II when authors like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ngaio Marsh were at their writing desks penning the soft-boiled, hard-boiled, and noir fiction that were quickly growing in popularity.
Among these literary giants, a young Eberhart was already creating a niche for herself blending strong female characters, domestic settings, and suspense with a touch of romance. Over her sixty-year career, she would become one of the most successful mystery novelists of her time, penning the fifty-nine bestsellers, published in sixteen languages, that established her as the “American Agatha Christie.”
But it was years before that, during the 1920s, when Eberhart was an English major, that she conceived of Nurse Sarah Keate. Hospitalized for various conditions, Eberhart found herself inspired to create a mystery in a medical setting with the nurse as the protagonist. Years later, she made her blockbuster debut The Patient in Room 18 and would go on to write seven more novels featuring Nurse Keate and her partner in crime, the dashing, observant, and wise Detective Lance O’Leary.
Earlier this year, I was asked to write an introduction for the reissue Nighttime Is My Time by the legendary Mary Higgins Clark. I often credit Clark, as do many of my contemporaries, as an early influence, not just as a writer, but also as a publishing trailblazer who paved the road for so many who came after her. When asked to site her influences, Clark is quoted as saying that Mignon Eberhart was her idol.
And, indeed, there’s a golden thread from Mignon’s work to Clark’s, to many of the great modern mystery, thriller, and psychological suspense writers—the brave young woman with agency caught in dangerous circumstances, relying only on her cleverness to not only survive but to solve the crime and save the day. Nurse Sarah Keate is an intelligent woman with a job to do, and often it leads her into dangerous predicaments. She solves the crime while never losing sight of her objective to care for her ill patients.
In her intelligence, her boldness, and her sense of humor, we see the blueprint for many female sleuths in contemporary mystery fiction today. In Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, in Kathy Reich’s Temperance Brennan, in P.D. James’s Cordelia Gray, we see the clear legacy of Nurse Sarah Keate.
In While the Patient Slept, Nurse Keate finds herself in the remote manor with her incapacitated patient, the house populated by a colorful and highly suspicious cast of characters: Jonah’s beautiful and nervous granddaughter March; his lurking brother Adolph; March’s surly cousin Eustace and Eustace’s enigmatic friend Deke; a shadowy business associate summoned by Mr. Federie in the days before his stroke; the help—the odd and unhelpful Grondal and mysterious cook Kema; to say nothing of the extremely high-strung male cat named Genevieve, and vicious, howling guard dog Konrad.
Though Nurse Keate’s voice, observations, and descriptions are often wry and darkly humorous, Eberhart paints a vivid and enthralling gothic portrait of the grand and rambling Federie mansion and the peculiarities of each character, all while using the house’s isolation and the storm outside to evoke a creeping sense of dread:
The fog outside had turned to sleet, and I could hear it beating gustily against the shutters….I shivered suddenly, though I was not cold and moved nearer the fire. There was that about the place that I definitely and positively did not like, and it was clear to me, even then, that it would not be a pleasant case.
And it was not.”
Nurse Keate’s initial instinct about the situation proves correct when on the first night, as she sits watch over her patient, old Mr. Federie’s brother Adolph is murdered by a shot through the heart.
Enter Detective Lance O’Leary, another of Eberhart’s recurring characters, and Nurse Keate’s partner in crime solving. The two first met in Eberhart’s debut The Patient in Room 18 and there’s a subtle but undeniable attraction and bonhomie between them. Their mutual admiration is clear, and their relationship, characterized by respect and playful banter, adds a certain lightness to this dark story of family secrets and murder.
While the Patient Slept can be read as more than just a gothic, closed-environment whodunit. Eberhart’s novels explore themes of isolation and the tension of family and domestic spaces. She offers a compelling feminist portrayal in a genre that, at the time, was most often dominated by male writers and male protagonists, delivering a layered portrayal of a professional woman, one who is level-headed, grounded, keenly observant, and brave. Eberhart was also deeply interested in human psychology and relationships.
“The complexity of human relationships is never simple to follow; it is like intricate lacework, but lacework made of steel,” she is quoted as saying.
We see so many of these tropes and themes explored, expanded upon, and modernized in later works of crime fiction by writers like Lucy Foley, Ruth Ware, and Megan Abbott to name just a few, Eberhart holding a golden thread that laces through to our best modern-day crime fiction writers.
Some of the things I most admired about Mary Higgins Clark as a writer were her devotion to craft, her extraordinary work ethic, and that ability to just sit down and write, day after day. For all the magic and mystery surrounding the life of the writer, that can be found as the cornerstone of most successful career novelists.
And certainly Mignon G. Eberhart—with her fifty-nine novels and her contributions to the genre—exhibited a similar devotion. When speaking of her writing routine to Publishers Weekly in 1974, she said, “I seat myself at the typewriter and hope, and lurk.”
This lurking would eventually result in an admirable body of work, earning her the Grand Master Award in 1971 from Mystery Writers of America (won this year by the great Laura Lippman, always vocal about the debt of gratitude she owes to the female trailblazers who came before her). Nine of Eberhart’s novels would make it to the big screen, including While the Patient Slept. One made it to Broadway.
Gertrude Stein lauded Eberhart in The Washington Post, praising her powers of description and naming her “one of the best mystifiers in America.” And Eberhart counted President Harry S. Truman as one of her fans.
Eberhart was in her early thirties, at the very beginning of her career, when While the Patient Slept hit the shelves. When Eva Mahoney, a reporter from The Omaha World Herald, interviewed the author at her home, she found a young writer fretting over the success of her next book, in the throes of a terrible case of imposter syndrome. Eberhart had never finished college. She met her husband Alan Eberhart while she was working at a library and started writing in the lonely hours, always in a new town, while trailing her engineer husband from job to job.
“Please remember that I am a beginner in the writing field,” she asked of Mahoney. “Right now, I feel very humble when I think of the work of such writers as Willa Cather.”
While the Patient Slept would be awarded the $5,000 Scotland Yard Prize for the best detective story of the year. Her next novel, The Mystery of Hunting’s End, would solidify her status as a major writer of the genre.
Eberhart would continue traveling with her husband. They would divorce, remarry. And “all the while,” writes Carson Vaughn in his 2023 retrospective of Eberhart, “through the Depression years and WWII and the moon landing and Vietnam, she kept writing, eight and a half pages a day, every day, until the novels–one by one–were complete.”
Eberhart died in 1996 at the age of ninety-seven. Toward the end of her life, the best-selling historical novelist John Jakes purchased a home just two doors down from Eberhart. At the time he did not know that one of the writers whose work he’d long admired and which he counted as one of his inspirations to write would be his new neighbor. But eventually the two became friends. In the written statement he prepared for her funeral, Jakes wrote: “She was, to use a shopworn but appropriate phrase, a fine lady who will be greatly missed.”
In 2023, Eberhart’s third novel, The Mystery of Hunting’s End, was selected for “One Book, One Nebraska,” a reading program that encourages readers across the state, “chosen from books written by a Nebraska author or that have a Nebraska theme or setting.” With honors like that, and loving reissues like this, nearly thirty years after her death, Mignon Eberhart is still touching readers, taking us back in time to that golden age of mystery writing.
You most certainly can see it as the beginning of that thread, one held by Eberhart, Christie, and Sayers, that would weave itself into the work of the generations that followedWhen you open While the Patient Slept, there are so many ways you can read the story that unfolds there. You could read it as the sophomore effort of a young writer who would go on to be one of the most successful writers of all time. You could read it as historical fiction, immersing yourself in the culture and mores of a moment in time nearly one hundred years ago. You might see it as a feminist outing, where Nurse Sarah Keate holds her own with, and bests, the powerful men in her sphere.
And you most certainly can see it as the beginning of that thread, one held by Eberhart, Christie, and Sayers, that would weave itself into the work of the generations that followed.
But I have a better idea. Let Eberhart cast her spell on you. Disappear into the richly wrought world she creates, absorb all the details of Federie Manor, the terrible storm outside, the grisly murders within. Wonder about the relationship between the smart, funny, observant nurse and the handsome, intelligent, detective.
And, as you would with any great mystery, lose yourself in the lively and entertaining story, populated by quirky and carefully drawn characters, and try to solve the puzzle Eberhart has so deftly laid out for her readers—then and now.
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