While the Patient Slept

Similar in many ways to Zenith Jones's Siren in the Night, this detective novel, published in 1930, is set in a mansion outside Boston, Massachusetts. The central character, Sarah Keate, has been summoned to the house to nurse the elderly patriarch, Adolph Federie, unconscious after a stroke. Soon after her arrival, one of the Federie family is murdered and her acquaintance from the local police force, Lance O'Leary, is called in to investigate. Combining her amateur investigative curiosity and his professional detective prowess, they set about finding out who is the murderer.

The author, Mignon Eberhart (née Good, born 6 July 1899), grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska. She was a voracious reader from an early age and was writing stories by the age of ten. She attended Nebraska Wesleyan University for three years but did not graduate. She began an apprenticeship at the city library in Lincoln. She got married in 1923 and began her career as a writer three days after the wedding. Her first novella appeared in 1925 and her first novel, The Patient in Room 18, featuring both Keate and O'Leary, was published in 1929. The follow-up (this novel) won the Scotland Yard Prize in 1930. Jay Fultz in his introduction to the 1995 reissue of While the Patient Slept, sets Eberhart's popularity in context: “American readers, disillusioned by the First World War and de-escalating from the twenties, sought escape in tantalizing puzzles, chilling conundrums, entertainments that made horror manageable”. She appeared on the scene slightly before Agatha Christie; by 1940 Eberhart was one of the most successful women mystery writers in the world, perhaps only overshadowed by Christie and Mary Roberts Rinehart, both of whom were older than her. She went on to write 57 novels, the last of which appeared in 1989. She was awarded a lifetime achievement award in 1994 at the Agatha Awards.

Although the appeal of detective fiction is largely escapist, Eberhart nonetheless poses uncomfortable questions about the violent tendencies of people in our very midst. Sarah Keate, the narrator,  comments:
“Our furtive looks at each other, the ugly speculation that lay back of very pair of meeting eyes, our haggard faces... all gave witness to the fear we had of each other. One does not as a rule connect crime... with one's nearest associates — with the people who live in the same house, eat at the same table, share the same daily routine with one's self. And I may as well state here and now that there is nothing more aptly calculated to make the stoutest hearted shake in his boots!”

A Farewell to Arms

This semi-autobiographical novel, published in 1929, is largely set in northern Italy during the First World War. The central character, Frederic Henry, an American student of architecture, is serving as a volunteer paramedic serving with an Italian military ambulance corps on the Isonzo Front, where Italy fought Austria-Hungary across the mountainous terrain of the Julian Alps. While receiving treatment at the American hospital in Milan, he falls in love with Catherine, an English nurse. When he recovers, his return to the front coincides with a chaotic retreat in which Italian military police execute lone soldiers amidst paranoia about enemy infiltration. Fleeing from this mayhem, he returns to Milan and flees to Switzerland with Catherine.

The author, Ernest Hemingway (born 21 July 1899), grew up in Chicago. Active in school journalism, on leaving school, he worked as a junior reporter. Unfit for the United States Army due to poor eyesight, he enlisted in the Red Cross in December 1917 and went on France in April 1918. Like the central character of this novel, he served, from June, as a volunteer with an Italian ambulance corps on the Isonzo Front . He was seriously wounded by a mortar shell on 8 July and recuperated at the American Red Cross hospital in Milan. He returned home in January 1919 and returned to journalism, firstly as a freelance correspondent for the Toronto Star and then as an associate editor of a Chicago periodical. In late 1921, newly married, he went to Europe to work as  a foreign correspondent of the Toronto Star and was based in Paris where he met influential writers and artists in the circle of Gertrude Stein. His first publication (a collection of short stories and poems) appeared in 1923. A second collection was published in 1925 and his first novel appeared in 1926. Perhaps his most famous novel, The Old Man and the Sea, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953. In the following year Hemingway received the Nobel Prize for Literature “for his mastery of the art of narrative... and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style”.

The narrator and central character describes the shell attack in which he is wounded in a graphic way:
“...there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red and on and in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind. I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you just died. Then I floated, and instead of going on I felt myself slide back. I breathed and I was back. The ground was torn up and in front of my head there was a splintered beam of wood. In the jolt of my head I heard somebody crying. I thought somebody was screaming. I tried to move but I could not move. I heard the machine-guns and rifles firing across the river and all along the river.”