Seeley, Mabel - The Chuckling Fingers

In The Chuckling Fingers, Minnesota mystery writer Mabel Seeley (1903–1991) presents the story of the weird and strange events that beset the Heaton family, Minnesota lumber tycoons, at their remote, pine-grown estate on Lake Superior. But let the author introduce her story herself:

"Other people may think they’d like to live their lives over, but not me -— not if this last week is going to be in it. Out of what has just happened at the Fingers both Jacqueline and I got something worth keeping, but Heaven defend me from ever again having to stand helplessly by while it becomes more and more apparent to almost everyone but me that the person I love most in the world is murderously insane. . . .

"I never again want to know the panic of being up against evil coming out of a mind so much more skillful than mine that even the signs we did see —- the acid in a bride’s toilet kit, the burned matchsticks under a bed, the word scrawled with a child’s blue chalk on a rock -— all just bogged us deeper in terror and despair. . . ."

Yes, well...

The Chuckling Fingers is available from Afton Press.

Jon Jermey

The Fingers of the title are an unusual rock formation near Lake Superior in Northern Minnesota. Seeley describes them very well; apparently they are imaginary, and made up for the novel. There is also a clever bit of business about some destroyed clothes on a vacation trip. This is genuinely ingenious, and would grace a much better puzzle plot novel than this. Otherwise this book is largely undistinguished. It suffers from the steady undercurrent of hysteria about personal relationships that mars so many lesser HIBK novels: reading these books can be downright emotionally exhausting, and nothing in the main plot is anywhere as good as the clever bit about the clothes. Seeley's titles often have the same linguistic pattern, a verb-ing noun: The Listening House, The Crying Sisters.

Mike Grost