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!”