The Beckoning Door: A Mystery

by Mabel Seeley

The Beckoning Door, published in 1950, was Seeley's last mystery and one of her best. The story takes place in a mid-Minnesota resort community.

Genres: Gothic, Mystery

219 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1950

About the author

Mabel Seeley was born Mabel Hodnefield in Herman, Minnesota. Her family moved to St. Paul in 1920, and she attended Mechanic Arts High School. 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. 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.

Reviews

[Carrie]

Mabel Seeley really needs to be rediscovered. I've had to find her books at Abe, and eventually I'll get them all (she wasn't prolific). Her female narrators are just regular working women caught up in odd circumstances, but they show grit and end up figuring out the mysteries ahead of the rest of the cast. So far all of them have a strong feminist lean that surprises me for the times (1940s-50s) and a timeless style that feels really modern. Well, on to the next search for another of her books!

[Matt Champagne]

Found this book on the sidewalk and had one of those "everything happens for a reason" things. So I read it and it reminded me of the mystery books I read a lot as a kid: Three Investigators type stuff, but this is less for kids. Though I'm not sure I *enjoy* whodunnits I respect the hell out of what goes into fashioning them. It seems real tough. All the misdirection and pre-establishing of events to make things come out the way you want them. What a headache.

[Quinn]

Ring the bell hard.

“Men just hate being wrong, though, especially if a girl is right.”

[Linda Limback]

Wonderfully suspenseful without graphic sex or violence. Seeley is a great mystery writer for those who don't mind picking up a dictionary occasionally to look up the definition of a word in common use during the 1930's but seldom used today.

[Susan]

Great!
A great mystery from days gone by. 1950 publication date.
Once I got into it, I couldn't put it down.
Great characters, story, mystery, setting - I feel like it is set in Minnesota, emotion, pacing.

[Sylvia Sarno]

A solid, hard to solve mystery.