The Listening House (1938) by Mabel Seeley

Mabel Seeley was an American writer from Herman, Minnesota, who was known as "The Mistress of Mystery" and considered by the eminent critic, Howard Haycraft, to be on equal footing with the headmistress of the "Had-I-But-Known" school of detective fiction, Mary Roberts Rinehart – promising to "pilot the American-feminine detective story out of the doldrums out of its own formula-bound monotony." A promise that earned her debut novel, The Listening House (1938), a place on "The Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones of Detective Fiction."

Curt Evans, of The Passing Tramp, has discussed Seeley on his blog several times and praised The Listening House as a "spirited updating of the old HIBK novel" with "a much grittier edge" than its Van Dinean floor plans suggests, but well plotted and managed as a pure detective story. Anthony Boucher even called the book "one of the best of all first mystery novels" twelve years after its original publication! So there was more than enough promise and expectations were high.

Regrettably, the promise remained largely unfulfilled as she only wrote seven novels between 1938 and 1954. The general opinion appears to be that none of them lived up to The Listening House, which has been out-of-print for decades with secondhand copies being "extremely tough" to find. Until recently. Back in mid-June, Berkeley finally published a new edition of this obscure, hard-to-find gem and since the book has an intriguing entry in Brian Skupin's Locked Room Murders: Supplement (2019), I immediately pounced on a copy. I never claimed I was original. 

The Listening House is narrated by a young divorcee, Mrs. Gwynne Dacres, who gets unceremoniously let go from her copy-writing job and has to look for both work and cheaper rooms, which brings her to the lodging house of Mrs. Harriet Garr at 593 Trent Street – situated in the fictitious Gilling City. According to Curt, Gilling City is a thinly disguised St. Paul, Minnesota, where Seeley lived and graduated university during the 1920s. Mrs. Garr can let Gwynne a spacious living room and kitchen for four dollars a week for the summer, which would leave her almost eighteen dollars a month to eat on. More than enough time and financial breathing room to get back on her feet. But she quickly begins to wonder if she had moved in with "a deranged old semi-lunatic" with "delusions of persecution."

Mrs. Garr spends her days rotating between her parlor, hallway and a basement room with a rocking chair, three cats and a dog while keeping a suspicious eye on each of her lodgers. She believed some "went snooping around the house at night." Gwynne began to see Mrs. Garr as "an evil-eyed old woman with lovely white hair" who has "three big cats sitting on her lap or rubbing against her chair" and "the black dog parked alongside," but, during the night, she gets the unnerving feeling that the whole house was "holding itself tensely awake in the dark, listening." Either the house or something was listening to every breath she took! And then the trouble really began.

During a morning stroll, Gwynne discovers the body of man who has been shot and dumped down a cliff side, which Mrs. Garr's lodging house overlooks. Several weeks later, a squad of policemen, revolvers drawn, enter the house to arrest one of the lodgers on a possibly related and shocking crime. Gwynne is attacked for the first of several times when she goes to investigate quiet, furtive sounds during the night and Mrs. Garr apparently goes missing during a trip to Chicago. Some days go by before they decide to call the police to help break open the door of the locked basement room. Mrs. Garr had locked her cats and dog in there, but, when the door is opened, they found her body, clothes and hair scattered about the floor – torn to pieces like a scavenger's meal! So definitely one of the grittiest locked room mysteries on record! And there's another one. But more on that in a moment.

Where the story, in my opinion, earned its stripes as a classic of its kind is not how it revitalized the time-worn HIBK formula or its eerie, well sustained atmosphere and general sense of mystification. Not even the impossible situations secured that status. What makes The Listening House standout is how perfectly Seeley balanced the pros and cons of being an amateur detective to carefully manage the progression of the story, plot and character backstories.

Gwynne reflects how "the reporters in the newspapers and the characters in the fiction always seemed to comprehend what the police were working toward," but, in the case of Mrs. Garr, she "never knew what the police were going to do or think, and when I did find out, afterward, I usually disagreed strenuously." The police did all the routine work with her eventually learning the results in due time. So there are certain important aspects and plot-threads alluded to in the first-half, but not examined until the second-half. Such as the locked room status of Mrs. Garr murder, which is eventually confirmed during a well written and reasoned inquest scene. But there's also Mrs. Garr seedy past with an incident from 1919 that made the entire city tremble to its core. Nothing is rushed with every aspect and character of the story getting an opportunity to breath. It also gives Gwynne ample to time to recover from the various assaults. Lieutenant Peter Strom, of the Homicide Squad, remarks at one point, "I don't see how you've kept alive this long."

The most serious attack happens when Gwynne is knocked out in the middle of the night and a big wad of cotton, "sopping with the God damn dry cleaner," is placed on her face, but the double doors to her room were not only locked from the inside – a chair had been hooked under the doorknobs. The windows were closed, covered and fastened both inside and out. So how did the murderer entered and leave the room? This second locked room problem has a far better solution than the first one, which is so incredibly simplistic you immediately know how it was done once you learn why it's a locked room mystery. While there's nothing flashy about the second locked room-trick, rather workmanlike in spirit, neither is it overly simplistic or merely routine. I thought these locked room puzzles nicely placed their little part in a busy, complicated and ever-evolving story crammed with shifty characters, happenings and long buried secrets. The Listening House is always moving forward with new things occurring or being discovered. Even after the case is solved, the plot continued to twist and turn until its last pages.

So my review gives you only a very small sample of what to expect from Seeley's The Listening House, which also include a domestic treasure hunt, a developing romance, a quasi-historical plot-thread going back to 1919 that's as dark as a modern psychological crime thriller and so much more. Everything nicely folded together in the end with all the clues and information fairly on display. Or, to quote the lady detective herself, "it's bad enough having another amateur find a murderer you've been hunting yourself, without having it pointed out to you that you should have jolly well known it all along." Only drawback, if you can call it that, is that neither the who or how will pull the rug from underneath your feet. But, on a whole, The Listening House is one of the better written, cleverly structured debuts from the genre's Golden Age. I can completely understand why expectations were so high. Nonetheless, Seeley has earned more than enough credit with The Listening House to give The Whispering Cup (1941) or Eleven Came Back (1943) a shot. 

Notes for the curious: 1) Lieutenant Strom half-mockingly called Gwynne “a finder-outer,” which sleuth slang I've only seen used in Enid Blyton's The Five Find-Outers series and nowhere else. Did she read the book and sort of remembered it? 2) Some websites, like the GADwiki, lists an eight, tantalizingly titled, mystery novel, Sealed Room Murder (1941). Besides a few mentions, it appeared as if the book simply didn't exist. But then I noticed one website noted it was supposedly published by the Collins Crime Club. What contentious locked room mystery novel did they publish that same year? Rupert Penny's Sealed Room Murder (1941). So don't drive yourself mad trying to track down Seeley's Sealed Room Murder.