At the university, she found inspiration for her writing career from Mary Ellen Chase, who was then teaching English there.
[1] In 1926 she married fellow student Kenneth Seeley and they moved to Chicago, where she wrote advertising copy for a department store.
All of her books with the exception of "Eleven Came Back" were set in Minnesota, and Seeley took pains to capture her Midwestern setting, including visiting a North Shore lake at nighttime to capture an eerie feeling for her book The Crying Sisters.
[3] St. Paul literary critic James Gray called her "a high priestess in the cult of murder as a fine art.
"[3] In 1954, while in the East to promote her last book, The Whistling Shadow, Mabel Seeley met lawyer Henry Ross.