Mignonette “Mignon” Good Eberhart was born on July 6, 1899, in Lincoln, Nebraska. She studied for three years at Nebraska Wesleyan University where she became a member of Alpha Gamma Delta. Her sister, Lulu Good Vogelsang, was also a member of the chapter. Vogelsang would go on to serve Nebraska Wesleyan on its governing board and Alpha Gamma Delta as national president. Both sisters were members of P.E.O.; Mignon was a member of Chapter CA\Nebraska.
M.G. Eberhart, as she was known professionally, described her journey as an author. She began writing when she was a teenager:
I preferred writing to studying Caesar’s Commentaries and algebra. There was one halcyon period during which I traded work on English themes for the solution of geometry problems, with an obliging classmate, but, perhaps for the best, this was very brief. There was a long novel to which I could add chapters at will, and numerous plays, all of which were advisedly destroyed. In my early twenties I gathered up courage and postage stamps and sent a book-length typescript to an editor. It was accepted. The story was a murder mystery and thus started me on a hard but rewarding writing path. The writer hopes that a mystery novel is entertaining to read but it is not easy to write.
She began writing in earnest after her 1923 marriage to Alanson Eberhart, an engineer.
The first short story The Dark Corner she submitted was rejected twice but it was finally published in Flynn’s, a detective magazine.
The Patient in Room 18 was her first published novel. It debuted in 1929. Her second novel was The Patient Slept and it was awarded a $5,000 Scotland Yard prize for the best detective story of 1929. The Crime Club also selected it as its book of the month selection.
In a newspaper interview which took place early in her career, she said that she read to her husband each day’s work and if he was bored with any of it, she would rewrite it. Her rationale was “I know the public will have the same reaction. A logical husband is almost a blessing if you’re going to write mysteries.”
In March 1930, she spoke at a dinner sponsored by Theta Sigma Phi, a national journalism sorority, at the Lincoln hotel. She related her plan for utilizing her leisure time in a productive way “in the writing of mysteries and murders.”
Nebraska Wesleyan University awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1935.
The couple divorced in 1943. She then married John Hazen Perry in 1946 but the marriage lasted about two years. They divorced in 1948 and she remarried her former husband. Alanson Eberhart died in 1974.
The Greenwich, Connecticut home in which she lived. (Alpha Gamma Delta Quarterly)
During her lifetime, Eberhart wrote more than 55 novels and was one of America’s best-known romantic suspense novelists. She was called the American Agatha Christie. Some of her recurring characters were Sarah Keate, Lance O’Leary, Susan Dare and James Wickwire. Her novels were adapted for cinema and television, and one was even performed on Broadway. She adapted the novel Fair Warning into a play Eight O’clock Tuesday, which ran on Broadway in 1941.
Eberhart was awarded a Grand Masters Edgar from the Mystery Writers of American and was a past president of the organization. Her books were translated in 20 languages. Harry Truman was “one of her most ardent fans.” In 1994 she received the Agatha Award: Malice Domestic Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Eberhart wrote her last book Three Days for Emeralds when she was almost 90. She died on October 8, 1996, at the age of 97 in a Greenwich, Connecticut nursing home.
In 2007, a collection of her short stories was published. The Cochrane-Woods Library at Nebraska Wesleyan University has first editions of her 59 novels and the music for the song Mignonette which was composed for Eberhart while she lived in Chicago.
A plaque identifying her as a recipient of an honorary doctorate from NWU and a list of her achievements was presented by the Nebraska Wesleyan University Alumni Association and is in the Alpha Gamma Delta chapter house.
