Mary Roberts Rinehart

• Born: August 12, 1876
• Birthplace: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
• Died: September 22, 1958
• Place of death: New York, New York

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; cozy

Principal Series: Miss Pinkerton, 1914-1942

Contribution

In a 1952 radio interview, Mary Roberts Rinehart said that she had helped the mystery story grow up by adding flesh and muscle to the skeleton of plot. Beginning at the height of the Sherlock Holmes craze, Rinehart introduced humor and romance and created protagonists with whom readers identified. Thus, the emotions of fear, laughter, love, and suspense were added to the intellectual pleasure of puzzle tales. The Circular Staircase (1908) was immediately hailed as something new, an American detective story that owed little to European influences and concerned characteristically American social conditions.

Rinehart’s typical novel has two lines of inquiry, often at cross purposes, by a female amateur and by a police detective. The woman, lacking the resources and scientific laboratories to gather and interpret physical evidence, observes human nature, watches for unexpected reactions, and delves for motive. The necessary enrichment of background and characterization forced the short tale (which was typical at the turn of the century) to grow into the detective novel. Critics sometimes patronize Rinehart as inventor of the Had-I-But-Known school of female narrators who withhold clues and stupidly prowl around dark attics. Her techniques, however, were admirably suited to magazine serialization. In addition to its influence on detective fiction, Rinehart’s work led to the genre of romantic suspense.

Biography

Mary Roberts Rinehart, born Mary Roberts, was reared in Pittsburgh. Her father was an unsuccessful salesman, and her mother took in roomers. At fifteen, Mary was editing her high school newspaper and writing stories for Pittsburgh Press contests. In 1893 she entered nurse’s training at a hospital whose public wards teemed with immigrants, industrial workers, and local prostitutes. In 1895 her father committed suicide. Mary Roberts completed her training and, in April, 1896, married a young physician, Stanley Rinehart.

In the next six years she had three sons, helped with her husband’s medical practice, and looked for a means of self-expression. By 1904 she was selling short stories to Munsey’s Magazine, Argosy, and other magazines. The Circular Staircase was published, and The Man in Lower Ten (1909) became the first detective story ever to make the annual best-seller list.

In 1910-1911, the Rineharts traveled to Vienna so that Stanley Rinehart could study a medical specialty. During the next few years, Rinehart wrote books with medical and political themes. When war broke out, she urged The Saturday Evening Post to make her a correspondent. In 1915 reporters were not allowed to visit the Allied lines, but Rinehart used her nurse’s training to earn Red Cross credentials. She examined hospitals, toured “No Man’s Land,” and interviewed both the king of Belgium and the queen of England.

Her war articles made Rinehart a public figure as well as a best-selling novelist. She covered the political conventions of 1916 (taking time out to march in a women’s suffrage parade) and turned down an offer to edit Ladies’ Home Journal. In 1920 two plays written with Avery Hopwood were on Broadway. The Bat had an initial run of 878 performances and eventually brought in more than nine million dollars. Rinehart lived in Washington, D.C., during the early 1920’s. In 1929 two of her sons set up a publishing firm in partnership with John Farrar. Annual books by Mary Roberts Rinehart provided dependable titles for the Farrar and Rinehart list.

Rinehart moved to New York in 1935, following her husband’s death in 1932, and continued an active life. Eleven of her books made best-seller lists between 1909 and 1936. The comic adventures of her dauntless never-married heroine Tish had been appearing in The Saturday Evening Post since 1910. During the 1930’s, she also produced an autobiography, wrote the somber short fiction collected in Married People (1937), and underwent a mastectomy. In 1946 Rinehart went public with the story of her breast cancer and urged women to have examinations. Her last novel was published in 1952, although a story in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1954 neatly rounded out the half century of detective writing since her poem “The Detective Story”—a spoof of the Sherlock Holmes craze—appeared in Munsey’s Magazine in 1904. She died in 1958.

Analysis

Mary Roberts Rinehart significantly changed the form of the mystery story in the early years of the twentieth century by adding humor, romance, and the spine-chilling terror experienced by readers who identify with the amateur detective narrator. Borrowing devices from gothic novels of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and from sensational fiction of the 1860’s, Rinehart infused emotion into the intellectual puzzles that dominated late nineteenth and early twentieth century magazines. By securing identification with the central character, she made readers share the perplexity, anxiety, suspense, and terror of crime and detection. Because she did not deal in static cases brought to a master detective for solution but rather with stories of ongoing crime, in which the need for concealment escalates as exposure approaches, the narrator almost inevitably becomes a target and potential victim.

Rinehart’s typical mystery has two investigators. One is a professional detective and the other a female amateur who narrates the story. All the important characters must be sufficiently developed so that the amateur can make deductions by watching their emotional responses and penetrating their motives. Rinehart’s books also include both romance (sometimes between the two detectives) and humor. The Man in Lower Ten, her first full-length mystery, was intended as a spoof of the pompous self-importance with which Great Detectives analyzed clues.

Like many readers, Rinehart used mysteries for escape; the “logical crime story,” she wrote, “provided sufficient interest in the troubles of others to distract the mind from its own.” On the wards of a busy urban hospital she had seen “human relations at their most naked.” In writing, however, she “wanted escape from remembering” and therefore chose “romance, adventure, crime, . . . where the criminal is always punished and virtue triumphant.”

She saw the mystery as “a battle of wits between reader and writer,” which consists of two stories. One is known only to the criminal and to the author; the other is enacted by the detective. These two stories run concurrently. The reader follows one, while “the other story, submerged in the author’s mind [rises] to the surface here and there to form those baffling clews.” In “The Repute of the Crime Story” (Publishers Weekly, February 1, 1930), Rinehart outlined the “ethics” of crime writing. The criminal

should figure in the story as fully as possible; he must not be dragged in at the end. There must be no false clues. . . . Plausibility is important, or the story may become merely a “shocker.” The various clues which have emerged throughout the tale should be true indices to the buried story, forming when assembled at the conclusion a picture of that story itself.

In most of Rinehart’s mysteries the “buried story” is not simply the concealment of a single crime. Also hidden—and explaining the criminal’s motives—are family secrets such as illegitimacy, unsuitable marriages, or public disgrace. This material reflects the sexual repression and social hypocrisy embodied in Victorian culture’s effort to present an outward appearance of perfect respectability and moral rectitude. Rinehart forms a bridge between the sensational novels of the 1860’s, which had used similar secrets, and the twentieth century psychological tale. Clues locked in character’s minds appear in fragments of dream, slips of the tongue, or inexplicable aversions and compulsions. In a late novel, The Swimming Pool (1952), the amateur detective enlists a psychiatrist to help retrieve the repressed knowledge. Even in her earliest books Rinehart used Freudian terminology to describe the unconscious.

Rinehart’s stories typically take place in a large house or isolated wealthy community. In British mysteries of the interwar years, a similar setting provided social stability; in Rinehart, however, the house is often crumbling and the family, by the end of the tale, disintegrated. The secret rooms, unused attics, and hidden passageways not only promote suspense but also symbolize the futile attempt of wealthy people to protect their status by concealing secrets even from one another. These settings also allow for people to hide important information from motives of privacy, loyalty to friends, and distaste for the police. In the Miss Pinkerton series (two stories published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1914, a collection of short fiction published in 1925, novels dated 1932 and 1942, and an omnibus volume published under the title Miss Pinkerton in 1959), Inspector Patton uses nurse Hilda Adams as an agent because when any prominent family is upset by crime, “somebody goes to bed, with a trained nurse in attendance.”

Relations between the professional detective and the female amateur—who is generally an intelligent and spirited single woman in her late twenties or early thirties—are marked by mutual respect and friendly sparring. Rinehart was not ignorant of scientific methods; her medical training made her perfectly comfortable with physiological evidence and the terminology of coroners’ reports. The official detective discovers physical clues and uses police resources to interview witnesses and tail suspects. Yet, as the narrator of The Circular Staircase says, “both footprints and thumb-marks are more useful in fiction than in fact.” The unofficial detective accumulates a separate—and often contradictory—fund of evidence by observing people’s reactions, analyzing unexpected moments of reticence, understanding changes in household routine, and exploring emotional states. The official detective enlists her aid, but she may conceal some information because she senses that he will laugh at it or because she is afraid that it implicates someone about whom she cares. She ventures into danger to conduct investigations on her own partly because she wants to prove the detective wrong and partly because of her own joy in the chase.

Although she wrote several essays on the importance to women of home and family life, Rinehart was an active suffragist and proud of having been a “pioneer” who went into a hospital for professional training at a time “when young women of my class were leading their helpless protected lives.” In her work, Rinehart used women’s “helplessness” and repression as a convincing psychological explanation for failure to act, for deviousness, and even for crime. In The Circular Staircase, a young woman complains of the humiliation of being surrounded by “every indulgence” but never having any money of her own to use without having to answer questions. The sexual repression and social propriety of women forced to depend on relatives for support because class mores prohibit their employment breed bitterness and hatred. Rinehart’s explicit yet empathetic exploration of motives for crime among women of the middle and upper classes is a marked contrast to the misogyny of the hard-boiled school.

The Circular Staircase

The innovations of Rinehart’s formula were almost fully developed in her first published book, The Circular Staircase. The wry tone, the narrator’s personality, the setting, and the foreshadowing are established in the opening sentence:

This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind, deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies happy and prosperous.

Rachel Innes shares certain traits with Anna Katharine Green’s Amelia Butterworth—both are inquisitive single women of good social standing—but Rinehart’s humor, her economical and spirited narration, and her ability to manage multiple threads of a complex plot made an instant impact on reviewers.

The house that Rachel Innes rents is a typical Rinehart setting with its twenty-two rooms, five baths, multiple doors, French windows, unused attics, and a circular staircase off the billiard room that was installed apparently so licentious young men could get up to bed without waking anyone. In addition, the electric company that serves the remote locale regularly shuts down at midnight. Before many days have passed, Rachel Innes is awakened by a gunshot at three o’clock in the morning and discovers, lying at the bottom of the circular staircase, the body of a well-dressed gentleman whom she has never seen before.

The romantic complications that shortly ensue confound the mystery. Rachel Innes’s nephew and niece (Halsey and Gertrude) are both secretly engaged, and each has some possible provocation for having murdered the intruder. Fear that her nephew or niece might be involved gives Rachel Innes a reason to conceal information from the detective, Jamieson. At the same time, some of the evidence that seems to point toward Halsey or Gertrude arises from their attempts to preserve the secrecy of their romantic attachments.

There are actually two “buried stories” in The Circular Staircase, although both Jamieson and Innes believe that they are on the track of a single criminal. The “outcroppings” that provide clues toward the solution of one mystery therefore lay false trails for the other. One involves a secret marriage, an abandoned child, and a vengeful woman; the other is a banker’s scheme to stage a fake death so that he can escape with the proceeds of an embezzlement. The ongoing efforts to conceal the second crime lead to further murders, and then to Halsey’s disappearance. That is a significant emotional shift; the tale now concerns not only the process of detection but also the threat of danger to characters about whom the reader cares. Rinehart orchestrates the suspense with additional gothic elements, a midnight disinterment, and a climax in which Innes is trapped in the dark with an unknown villain in a secret chamber that no one knows how to enter. The identification of reader with detective and the sure-handed manipulation of suspense and terror are hallmarks of the Rinehart style (and of a great many subsequent thrillers).

The competition between the female amateur and the male professional is to some degree a conflict between intuitive and rational thinking. While Jamieson accumulates physical evidence and investigates public records, Innes listens to the tones that indicate concealment, understands when people are acting against their will, and believes her senses even when they seem to perceive the impossible. At one point her nephew says, “Trust a woman to add two and two together, and make six.” She responds,

If two and two plus X make six, then to discover the unknown quantity is the simplest thing in the world. That a household of detectives missed it entirely was because they were busy trying to prove that two and two make four.

Both the suspense and the humor are heightened by Rinehart’s facility with language. Her use of a middle-aged never-married woman’s genteel vocabulary to describe crime, murder, and terror is amusing, and her ease with other dialects and with the small linguistic slips that mar a banker’s disguise in the role of a gardener show the range of her verbal resources.

An Influential Writer

In a later generation, when some of Rinehart’s innovations had been incorporated in most crime fiction and others had given rise to the separate genre of romantic suspense, critics of the detective story frequently wrote condescendingly of her as the progenitor of the Had-I-But-Known school of narration. The device grew from the demands of magazine writing; only two of Rinehart’s mysteries had their initial publication in book form. When writing serials, she pointed out, each installment “must end so as to send the reader to the news stand a week before the next installment is out.” The narrator’s veiled reference to coming events arouses suspense and maintains the reader’s anxious mood.

Rinehart began writing mysteries two years after The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-1902) was published; she was already well established by the heyday of British classical detection, published throughout the hard-boiled era, and was still writing when Ian Fleming started work on the James Bond books. By the time Rinehart died, her books had sold more than eleven million copies in hardcover and another nine million in paperback. The bibliographical record presents some problems. Rinehart identified seventeen books as crime novels; in these, the central action is an attempt to discover the causes of a murder. Almost all of her fiction, however, combines romance, humor, violence, and buried secrets, and paperback reprints often use the “mystery” label for books that Rinehart would not have put into that category. There are also variant British titles for some books and a number of omnibus volumes that collect novels and short stories in various overlapping configurations.

Principal Series Characters:

• Hilda “Miss Pinkerton” Adams , is a trained nurse, who is single, sensible, intelligent, and strong-willed. Twenty-nine in her first appearance and thirty-eight by the last, she often attends the bedside of prominent citizens who suffer illness or nervous collapse after a robbery, murder, or family crisis.
• Detective Inspector Patton , the police detective who gave Miss Pinkerton her nickname, depends on her keen ability to observe.

Bibliography

Bachelder, Frances H. Mary Roberts Rinehart: Mistress of Mystery. San Bernardino, Calif.: Brownstone Books, 1993. Monograph examining Rinehart’s work and her place in the pantheon of mystery writers.

Bargainnier, Earl F., ed. Ten Women of Mystery. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1981. Compares Rinehart’s work to that of nine of her fellow female mystery writers.

Cohn, Jan. Improbable Fiction: The Life of Mary Roberts Rinehart. Rev. ed. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006. Detailed biographical study of Rinehart, focusing on her unusual situation as a famous and influential woman at a time when few women enjoyed such a position in American culture.

Doran, George H. Chronicles of Barabbas, 1884-1934. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935. Written by Rinehart’s publisher, this detailed account of the business of publishing provides insight into the practical considerations of marketing Rinehart’s work.

Downing, Sybil, and Jane Valentine Barker. Crown of Life: The Story of Mary Roberts Rinehart. Niwot, Colo.: Roberts Rinehart, 1992. An authorized biography of Rinehart, focusing on her development from nurse to successful author.

DuBose, Martha Hailey, with Margaret Caldwell Thomas. Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2000. Describes the life of Rinehart and provides critical comment on her work.

Fleenor, Julian E., ed. The Female Gothic. Montreal: Eden Press, 1983. Places Rinehart’s work within the centuries-old gothic tradition.

Huang, Jim, ed. They Died In Vain: Overlooked, Underappreciated, and Forgotten Mystery Novels. Carmel, Ind.: Crum Creek Press, 2002. Rinehart is among the authors discussed in this book about mystery novels that never found the audience they deserved.

MacLeod, Charlotte. Had She But Known: A Biography of Mary Roberts Rinehart. New York: Mysterious Press, 1994. This biography of Rinehart concentrates on the extent to which her later career as an influential author was an unpredictable swerve in the road of what began as a fairly conventional life.