Mignon G. Eberhart (1899–1996)

Mignon Good was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, and attended Nebraska Wesleyan University. She began to write in her early teens and published her first novel, The Patient in Room 18, in 1929. In 1923, she married Alanson C. Eberhart. Mignon G. Eberhart became a popular and successful writer, who produced more than 60 novels, including a number of historical mysteries, short stories, novellas, plays and at least one screenplay. Many of her works mixed mystery and romance, and several were adapted for film and television, including The White Cockatoo (1935), While the Patient Slept (1935), Murder by an Aristocrat (1936), The Murder of Dr. Harrigan (1936), The Great Mystery Hospital (1937), The Dark Stairway (1938), and Three’s a Crowd (1945). By the end of the 1930s, she had become the leading female crime novelist in the USA and was one of the highest paid female crime novelists in the world, next to Agatha Christie and Mary Roberts Rinehart. She was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America in 1971 and continued to be an active writer of mystery fiction until the late 1980s. A posthumous collection of her short stories, Dead Yesterday and Other Stories, was published in 2007.