The Crying Sisters

Janet Ruell is a brainy and talented librarian from a provincial Minnesota backwater called Eldreth where, as she explains, because she has not married and she is nearing thirty, she is treated like a third class citizen and scorned or pitied by all. On a automobile vacation on a hot summer day she stops by a toutist camp and joins twenty or thirty strangers for a meal served on a porch. There she meets little Scottie, or "Cottie," as he calls himself, a charming toddler with a suspicious, yet magnetic father in tow. Janet's having one of those moments without which the plot could hardly begin, but she makes that existential leap of faith and takes off with father and son for another tourist camp, this one on the lake of the "Crying Sisters." It's an old Indian legend of two sisters who loved each other so deeply you can still hear them screaming and crying for each other across the eerie stillness of the night lake. Janet's behavior is puzzling, especially since she knows hunky Dad had a revolver hidden among his things, but the plot of the book is a sort of rehash of Jane Eyre, with the man who calls himself "Steve Corbett" like a Clark Gable version of Rochester. Janet spends most of the book tending to little Cottie, disliking his father, and terrified as fellow guests at the motel start dying and disappearing at strange times of the night. What's great about the book is that, although Seeley is often compared to such HIBK queens as Mary Roberts Rinehart and Mignon G. Eberhart, she is actually much closer to a social realist, and her picture of this flybynight tourist trap, with its creepy denizens and downright hideous atmosphere, gives her a noir edge the others lack. Well, to be fair, they weren't interested in unearthing life among the lower strata of society, while Seeley is fascinated by the Erskine Caldwell lowlives who populate her best books. After making your way through the Grand Guignol horrors of THE CRYING SISTERS, one wonders why she isn't being anthologized by the Library of America in their CRIME NOVELS series. If the guy who wrote NIGHTMARE ALLEY is in there, why not Seeley? THE CRYING SISTERS is as gruesome and haunting as NIGHTMARE ALLEY, no, more so, but because it was written by a woman (perhaps especially a woman called "Mabel"), she has been relegated to obscurity and to specialist regional presses like this one.

I loved this book, although at first I found it hard to accept the premise that a woman would just chuck a vacation for herself and go off to become a nanny. But it turned out to be an excellent story with a well-written and suspenseful plot. It also gives a nice sense of the society of the 1940's, when people did enjoy staying in tourist camps and life was simpler. The lurking evil is first rate, a couple of perfect red-herrings and fully developed characters make this a fun book for summer reading, especially if you like the Great Lakes.

I was born in 1955. I read this book as a teenager and it was tremendously exciting. I read the book again as an adult with children and again I fell in love with it. It has the same mastery of writeing, as To Kill a Mockingbird. It isn't the same type of story. But the scare is timeless. The story is about a young woman who is a lone in the world without family. She is bright and intelligent and without any prospects for a family of her own. She meets a man with a charming child. He offers her a job takeing care of the boy while he pursues infomation on his long missing wife. During which time she poses as his wife. A long forgotten scandal is involved along with several tense moments as murder is uncovered and the suspicion that the man is involved in the unsolved deaths. Really great with a lot of suspense.

If you've ever been to any of the old-time lake cabins in Minnesota, you'll feel like your there again when you read this classic 1940's mystery. The characters are perfect, and the setting, right down to the dirt and gravel paths to the lake, is so real you can almost see it. All Seeley's books have a real distinct 40's feel to them, so if you enjoy that, I'd say they're well worth your time.

A well-written mystery with many a twist in the plot. The characters are interesting and the book keeps you guessing until the very end.