Mary Ann Eckels, the former Ballantine mystery editor and onetime editorial head of the Mystery Guild Book Club, died on September 25. She was 87.
Though she was a "lifelong lover of good books," Eckels's entry into the publishing world was a "leap of faith," according to friends. After working for TWA Airlines right out of college, Eckels accepted a position at Random House imprint Ballantine in 1980 as secretary to the assistant to the then-editor-in-chief, Marc Jaffe. Under Jaffe, who was instrumental in the rise of the mass market paperback, Eckels became a mystery editor, acquiring paperback rights to numerous hardcover bestsellers and shaping many paperback original mysteries and series over the rest of the decade.
In the mid 1990s, Eckels was tapped to serve as editor-in-chief of the Mystery Guild Book Club, a division of the Literary Guild. There, she became a steward of the mystery community, frequently appearing on panels at national mystery conferences and sharing her editorial expertise and publishing connections with emerging authors. Among the authors she supported was Sue Grafton, author of the internationally-lauded Alphabet Mystery series.
Eckels capped off her publishing career at the Blumer Literary Agency, where she read unsolicited manuscripts, before retiring to Florida, where her friends say she spent time studying at the Vero Beach Museum of Art School and pursuing other passions.
In a statement to PW, Eckels's friends summed up her philosophy with a quote from Into the Woods author Tana French: "A good mystery can make us see the world differently—not because it tells us what’s there, but because it makes us look.”
