Born in 1899, she was called America's Agatha Christie by her biographer, Rick Cypert, and was once the third highest paid female mystery writer (after Christie herself and Mary Roberts Rinehart). Her name is Mignon Good Eberhart and she was nothing if not a prolific writer, with 59 novels and numerous short stories, novellas and plays, many adapted for film in the 1930s and 1940s. It didn't hurt that she got an early start on her career as a teenager.

Her first book was The Patient in Room 18, introducing nurse Sarah Keate and police detective Lance O'Leary (who both appeared in four more novels), later made into a movie starring Ann Sheridan and Patric Knowles. Female sleuths abound today, but it was still somewhat revolutionary for the time. Eberhart wasn't necessarily an early feminist, however—she said of her creation, "I loved her because she had a good sharp tongue." It was only a year after the publication of this book that Agatha Christie followed suit and introduced Miss Jane Marple for the first time in a novel. Another of her popular heroines was Susan Dare, a precursor to Jessica Fletcher of Murder She Wrote. Dare, quite possibly Eberhart's best creation, only appeared in short stories, some of which you'll find in the 2007 Crippen and Landru collection titled Dead Yesterday.

Eberhart's books primarily feature female heroines in often-exotic locations; in fact, her primary contribution is quite probably to the development of the romantic-suspense subgenre in crime fiction, one reason she's often said to resemble more Rinehart than Christie. Another reason for that comparison is Eberhart's dedication to character development and her interest in scientific detection, as seen through her nurse-protagonist and medical themes. Plus, Rinehart herself had her own Nurse Pinkerton.

Some contemporary readers will find formulaic elements and eye-rolling elements in Eberhart's novels, particularly the early ones where female heroines tend to show poor judgement and even faint (does anyone really faint all that often? Did they ever?), but she was adept with the elements of suspense and atmosphere in what Thrilling Detective said was "spare but almost lyrical" writing. Mike Grost added that that "suspense passages in Eberhart often show the heroine with a heightened sensory awareness of her surroundings, and are almost hallucinatory in their intensity."

These qualities are seen in her closed community mystery from 1946, Five Passengers From Lisbon. Five passengers and three crewmen survive a sinking Portugese cargo ship via a lifeboat, but when they're picked up by a U.S. hospital ship, the Portugese mate is found murdered. Against a backdrop of Portugal being a haven for espionage with undertones of Nazi and Resistance alliances, Eberhart spins a claustrophobic web first as the group floats in the darkness and thick fog.

In H. R. F. Keating's Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books, he describes Mignon Eberhart as the heir and successor to Mary Robert Rinehart and a "star writer" in the first person single feminine tradition. Gertrude Stein described her as one of the "best mystifiers in America." She received the Scotland Yard Prize in 1930, became the Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of American in 1971, and 1979, received a MWA special Edgar to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of her first novel. ( )