Mignon G. Eberhart’s The Promise of Murder, which came in this Dell edition in 1961 with art by Mort Engel, was originally published as Melora in 1959. We turned to Eberhart because we wanted a break from the type of women that predominate male-authored vintage crime fiction. Eberhart, even in her less successful efforts, creates women with enough emotional depth to cleanse the palate that occasionally becomes too flavored by hard-as-nails femmes fatales. We haven’t yet read a book of hers we truly loved, but we always like her women. She has a knack of making them relatable.
In this book Eberhart tells the story of Anne Wystan, whose husband’s ex-wife Melora returns to the Wystans’ lives for mysterious reasons. She’s literally inside the sprawling Wystan mansion one day when Anne returns from an outing. That sets the creepy meter ticking. It hits peak levels when Anne keeps finding notes promising, “I’m going to kill you.” But she doesn’t believe the threat is real until, during the night of a snowstorm, with the house’s electricity down because of the weather (or is it the weather?), she’s attacked by a man in black.
Between Melora resurfacing, a sister-in-law who unilaterally runs the Wystan domicile like her personal fiefdom, a sixteen-year-old niece who treats Anne shabbily, and the black-clad intruder, Eberhart hits the same note over and over of others attempting to deny a woman control over her own circumstances. We won’t tell you whether the promise of murder is kept, but we can tell you that The Promise of Murder manages to be creepy and mostly interesting, perhaps dragging just a bit in the late middle stages before rebounding for the climax. We still didn’t love it, but it’s our favorite Eberhart so far.
