After her retirement from acting in the 1970s Edith reviewed local productions for the Argus-Leader, publishing her final review ( The Fantasticks) in March 1979, just two months before her death at the age of seventy-eight.
FAITH EVANS YOU BEEN ON MY MIND FULL
Yet she enjoyed an impressively full creative existence, allowing her to give rewarding expression to her twin true loves: professional writing and amateur acting.īetween 19 Edith wrote eight mystery novels, seven of which were published in the United States and the United Kingdom as well as other countries (there are some particularly nice Spanish-language paperback editions) and during this time as well, and for many years afterward, she was one of the leading lights in Sioux Falls’ community theater, both writing plays and performing in them. When he failed to make any headway with the object of his fervent devotion, he rang off, angrily admonishing her, “I guess your books aren’t so good after all!” Edith, resistant to the charms of such men, remained single for the rest of her life. Another of Edith’s male mystery admirers rang her up at home on the telephone one night, obviously inebriated and gushingly praising her books.
FAITH EVANS YOU BEEN ON MY MIND FOR FREE
Living up to her “unpretentious” reputation, Edith Howie wryly noted to her Argus-Leader interviewer, Lois Thrasher (who the next year would transfer to the Chicago Daily News, where she became night editor in 1945), that so far her greatest putative perk of fame as an author consisted of receiving myriad marriage proposals from importunate “mail-order bachelors,” like the gentleman quoted at the top of this introduction, who had eagerly espied Edith’s picture in The Family Circle, a women’s household magazine distributed for free at the once omnipresent Piggly Wiggly grocery store chain. The novel had appeared in Three Prize Murders, a trilogy of tales which had received honorable mentions in publisher Farrar and Rinehart’s second annual Mary Roberts Rinehart mystery contest, named for America’s preeminent woman crime writer (one of her sons had co-founded the company) and it had been highly praised in the New York Times Book Review by Isaac Anderson, who pronounced it “as puzzling and as entertaining a mystery as one could desire.” (The previous year Elizabeth Daly had entered her debut novel, Unexpected Night, in the first Mary Roberts Rinehart mystery contest, in which she, like Edith Howie the next year, was a runner-up.)
When an August 1941 profile in the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader, the leading newspaper of the Great Plains state of South Dakota, described Edith Howie as an “unpretentious person, quiet, small-featured and trim,” with auburn hair, “deep blue eyes and…small, tapered…unusually beautiful hands,” Edith, an unmarried woman of forty-one years who lived quietly in Sioux Falls with her parents, had just published her maiden mystery novel, Murder for Tea, about the fatal poisoning of the town vamp at a literary luncheon.
I am 43 years old and have brown eyes and dark haire and weigh 175 and 6 feet tall. I have been in Dakota a few years now and liked it all rite. I would like to come up and see you if that all rite with you. Send picture of your self and I will do the same. I am single not been married but would like to if I could find the rite girl ha ha.
Thought I would like for you to correspond with me. I saw a picture in the family circle and liked the looks of you.