most successful and beloved mystery writers, Mignon Good Eberhart (1899–1996) enjoyed a career that spanned six decades and produced sixty books, beginning with The Patient in Room 18 (1929) and concluding with Three Days for Emeralds (1988). Her first five books featured Sarah Keate, a middle-aged spinster, nurse, and amateur detective who works closely with Lance O’Leary, a promising young police detective in an unnamed midwestern city. This unlikely duo functions effectively, despite Keate’s penchant for stumbling into dangerous situations from which she must be rescued. She is inquisitive and supplies O’Leary with valuable information.
Equally unlikely is the fact that six films featuring Nurse Keate and O’Leary were filmed over a three-year period in the 1930s. While the Patient Slept (1935) featured Aline MacMahon as Nurse Keate and Guy Kibbee as O’Leary. The Murder of Dr. Harrigan (1936) starred Kay Linaker in the lead role, renamed Nurse Sally Keating and now much younger. Murder by an Aristocrat (1936) has Marguerite Churchill as Keating, and The Great Hospital Mystery (1937) features a much older Jane Darwell, before Warner Brothers–First National decided to go younger again with a lovely Ann Sheridan starring in both The Patient in Room 18 (1938) and Mystery House (1938).
Eberhart’s other series detective is Susan Dare, who, like her creator, is a mystery writer. Young, attractive, charming, romantic, and gushily emotional, she has a habit of stumbling into real-life murders.
“Introducing Susan Dare” was originally published in the April 1934 issue of Delineator; it was first collected in The Cases of Susan Dare (Garden City, New York, Doubleday, Doran, 1934).