The Chuckling Fingers
By Mabel Seeley
Afton Historical Society Press
$24.00
Reviewed by Mike Nardine originally in Reader Weekly
When The Chuckling Fingers was first published in 1941 the title didn’t provide us with the kinky associations that it does today after forty years of suggestive television situation comedies; the United States was still at peace, the atom hadn’t been split and the moon landing was only speculative science fiction. The cold war which so “altered and illuminated or times” as Walter Cronkite used to say in the fifties was years away. Most of us now reading this review ( at least I hope somebody reads this thing) were yet unborn.
But great events, no matter how altering and illuminative, are beside the point. Author Mable Seeley might not have heard of Hiroshima or even imagined watching sexually explicit television like nearly everyone but our editor does today, but she still understood more about human nature than any historian. After more than fifty years the characters in this mystery are as modern as today. There’s a rich, older man and several angry relatives disappointed over a recently acquired beautiful young wife not much older than some of his children. We have a suspicious foreigner with an overly active libido (French, of course. How’s that for timely?), a saccharine-sweet child guaranteed to gag any cynic, a maid, a nubile, flamboyant adolescent out to shock her elders and a female chief protagonist with the mind of a lieutenant of detectives; and last but not least, a dour, determined Finnish surnamed Sheriff of Cook County. All of these characters—and several other interesting ones besides—are trapped together on a huge estate on the North Shore of Lake Superior a few miles from Grand Marais where murder, mayhem and suspence become the norm. As we drove eastward the twelve miles from Grand Marais to Fiddler’s Fingers…
Mabel Seeley is (Or was. She died at 88 in 1991.) a superb technician. See how she manages to convey a sense of mystery even after giving the plot away in the book’s first paragraph: Other people may think they’d like to live their lives over, but not me—not if this last week is going to be in it….Heaven defend me from ever again having to stand helplessly by while it becomes more and more apparent to almost everyone but me that the person I love most in the world is murderously insane. She does this by making the plot completely subservient to character and character, as we all know is relative. Everyone sees everything a bit differently. And never more so than in a book by Mable Seeley. Her characters are so “in character” as to make any experience they suffer a nearly vicarious one for the reader.
One of the best ways to get a feel for a period is to read a historical novel—or an old novel like this one, read many years after it was first published. But The Chuckling Fingers isn’t historical even if it does describe people at a time long gone. If anything, it is a time capsule that reminds us that while events come and go human nature doesn’t seem to change. Nor, it seems, has the Northland: My nose filled with the warm sun-heated pine smell that’s as pungent as spice. When the car slowed to take the hairpin curves I heard for the first time over the hum of the motor the wilderness sound that was to be woven through all that happened—the rushing clash of pine tops, the wind’s rustle and swirl among pine needles, the crash of water against rock. This book can be purchased at the publishers websiteWWW.AftonPress.Com