Remembering Nebraska’s forgotten “whodunit queen”
When reporter Eva Mahoney arrived in Valentine in the spring of 1930, bound to profile America’s next great mystery novelist for the Omaha World-Herald, she found Mignon Good Eberhart in a “pleasant little home,” struggling to visualize her next murder.
Bewitched by her new surroundings, the big skies and grassy dunes, the author had contrived a remote hunting lodge in the Nebraska Sandhills as the site for her fictional crime. It had log doors, rough-hewn tables, “a great, deep fireplace made of native, unfinished rock,” Eberhart wrote, and a hodgepodge of antique pewter lamps, a quirk of the cabin’s late owner, a prominent trustee from the fictional city of Barrington.
“Naturally they don’t give much light, so I can employ darkened corners and shadows to heighten the horror,” she told Mahoney.
None less than Gertrude Stein would later praise Eberhart’s descriptive powers, insisting in the Washington Post that “she has the best sense of interiors – of presenting rooms,” and crowning her “one of the best mystifiers in America.” Before her death in 1996, Eberhart would publish a mind-boggling 59 novels, earning monikers like “America’s Agatha Christie” and “America’s Whodunit Queen.” One of those books made it to Broadway. Nine others hit the silver screen.
And, in 1971, she would win the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1971, joining Christie and other titans of the genre. (She would have preferred the title “Grandmistress,” she later joked.)
But just now, under contract with a major New York City publisher, half-finished with her third mystery novel and humoring a journalist herself, the floor plan didn’t work – not quite.
“I don’t know how I’m going to have it architecturally correct and still be able to obstruct the view from that balcony,” she wondered aloud. “My husband has promised to come to my aid with a set of blueprints.”
He did. Months later, she finished the book, her first and only set in the Sandhills, “the most extraordinarily desolate place I had ever seen in all my life,” her narrator begins.
Now, 93 years after its original publication, the Nebraska Center for the Book has chosen “The Mystery of Hunting’s End” – blueprints and all – for its 2023 One Book One Nebraska program, which encourages Nebraskans to “read and discuss” a single book connected to the Cornhusker State.
Less studied than Mari Sandoz; less sentimental than Bess Streeter Aldrich; more playful than Willa Cather and Wright Morris, too; Eberhart landed somewhere beyond Nebraska’s literary canon. Perhaps somewhere behind.
But if ever there was an Eberhart revival, this is it. The University of Nebraska Press has since reissued “The Mystery of Hunting’s End” for the first time in over a decade, in addition to five other Eberhart titles that had previously fallen out of print. And thanks to the One Book designation, readers from Omaha to Ogallala will soon curl up with her work.
“The selection came as a complete and wonderful surprise,” said Clark Whitehorn, executive editor of Bison Books, the University of Nebraska Press’ trade imprint. “Unlike Willa Cather or Mari Sandoz, Eberhart has been overlooked by most readers today, so we’re delighted that (the pick) has helped to remind Nebraskans of this wonderful writer.”
