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Dead Yesterday

Page history last edited by Jon 14 years, 11 months ago

Eberhart, Mignon G - Dead Yesterday (2007)

 

Mignon G. Eberhart lived until a great age and was always popular, or so it seems, but today we depend on small companies like Crippen & Landru to gve us new editions of her work.  Here we have her biographer, Rick Cypert, joining forces with Kirby McCauley to present a well-rounded and generous selection of what they consider her best short stories.  Are they her best?  I don't know, but nearly every one has something to recommend it, and even the stories I went in thinking "this is going to be crummy,"each got better as it went along.  All in all, Dead Yesterday is a discovery of the first water.

 

Eberhart rose to fame with some nurse-detective stories featuring capable Sarah Keate, a bit of a ripoff of her rival Mary Roberts Rinehart and hersuperior "Miss Pinkerton," Hilda Adams.  And yet the stories themselves are as good,  or nearly as good, as Rinehart’s and that’s saying something. I wouldn't have dared to invite Eberhart and Rinehart to the same party!  (MGE even sticks a blowsy "Nurse Hilda" into the lead-off story here, as if to jab her rival with that ol’ two-can-play-at-this-game spear.)  Some rare Keate stories appear here, one an absolute dud, but otherwise Eberhart's virtues instantly assert themselves: a gift for atmosphere, for shuddery suspense, for a note of horror in the underpinnings of her plots, and for some good detective work on the part of her sleuths.  Of the nurse mysteries here, "The Night Watch Mystery" is the most plebeian, "Dead Yesterday" the spookiest.  "Marked for Death"' is obviously an attempt to cash in on the local color of the Chicago World's Fair and has a dumb story, not worthy of Sarah Keate's talent.  "Murder on the Wall" is a quick moving pursuit entry that approaches true terror, if not much detection, and "The Empty Inn," with its luxurious European setting, puts our heroine into the fish out of water bag once again and me no likey.

 

What can I say about Eberhart's next series creation, the ebullient Susan Dare?  I would have loved a whole book of her complete cases--and I hope the present book gets enough attention to merit a sequel so that I can read the rest of them!  Dare was my first crush when I was a boy and now that I return to her a grown man, I'm still infatuated.  Not all female detectives had to be old snoops like Helen Hayes, au contraire!  Susan Dare is real, smart and full blooded as Louise Brooks, and each one of the stories here is a winner. 

 

With Dare, Eberhart can indulge her passion for travel writing in a way that seems fitting—whereas for Sarah Keate you really had to think of a good reason to pry her out of the hospital settings she thrived in.  "Murder by Proxy," a story new to me, has a great method for murder.  "Feather Heels," set in an impossibly elegant and exotic Miami, won't stump many readers but has the best of Eberhart's winningly garish names (including, here, Gaar Turnham and Francine Blowry). 

 

With "The Flowering Face" and "The Wedding Dress," Eberhart achieves a perfect blend of detection and poetry, and the bizarre, memorable "Postiche" anticipates the scary tales of madness perfected by Hilda Lawrence in the 1940s.  After these great peaks the collection moves smoothly enough into the detective work of Mr. James  Wickwire, who must have been Eberhart's attempt to write the most colorless detective in all of literature.  It's bizarre how bland he is, and yet for the most part, the stories in which he appears are pretty cool.  They just lack the divine spark of Susan Dare.

 

Kevin Killian.

 

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