If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.
You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

Collins, Mary

Page history last edited by Randal Brandt 15 years, 10 months ago

Mary Garden Collins is an American author. She was born in 1908 in St. Louis, Missouri. Her family moved to Berkeley, California when she was three years old. At the time of the publication of her first novel, The Fog Comes (1941), she wrote: "I went to public schools in Berkeley and Miss Burke's School in San Francisco, and had a brief whirl at the University of California--which makes me practically illiterate."

In 1938, after writing and selling short pieces to an Eastern women's magazine, Collins read a number of mystery stories and decided she could go them one, or more, better. Between 1941 and 1949 she published six mystery novels, all set in California.

"Mary Collins, a brilliant member of the northern group, has won a wide reputation as a writer of unusual mystery stories: Fog Comes, Dead Center, Sister of Cain, etc., but no doubt will graduate before long into a full-fledged novelist. She has imagination, as distinct from invention, a remarkable flair for character pyschology, style and magnetism. And atmosphere. The scene of action of Sister of Cain is that weird old Humphrey-Giffen house on Chestnut Street, and the sinister atmosphere she caught in such perfection that the book drove many readers to loiter past it and enjoy a renewal of those shudders beloved by mystery fans. In 1944 Mary had a baby, and that form of creation drives the loftier faculty into a remote brain cell and padlocks the door--and that padlock has to be wrenched open and the poor dormant 'creative faculty' dragged out, coaxed, petted, implored, scolded, abjectly apologized to, before it finally condescends to pour its light through the upper story and get back on the job. Mary is lovely to look at. She is tall and slender, has charming manners and knows how to dress."--Gertrude Atherton, My San Francisco: A Wayward Biography (Bobbs-Merrill, 1946), p. 136.

~Randal Brandt