Mabel Seeley

Mabel Seeley was born Mabel Hodnefield in Herman, Minnesota. Her family moved to St. Paul in 1920, and she attended Mechanic Arts High School. She graduated summa cum laude from University of Minnesota. In 1926 she married Kenneth Seeley and they moved to Chicago, Illinois, where she wrote advertising copy for a department store. When her husband contracted tuberculosis, she moved with him back to Minnesota for medical treatment. Her first book, The Listening House, was published in 1938. In 1941, she won the Mystery of the Year Award for her book The Chuckling Fingers. In 1945 she joined the Mystery Writers of America and served on its first Board of Directors. In the late 1940s she and her son Gregory moved to California. In 1954, while travelling to promote her last book, The Whistling Shadow, she met lawyer Henry Ross, whom she married two years later. They settled in New Jersey, and she stopped writing. Over the course of her career, she wrote seven mysteries, all between 1938 and 1954, and all of them period pieces set in the Midwest.