Mary Roberts Rinehart -- January 2016
PERSONAL INFORMATION: Born August 12, 1876, in Pittsburgh, PA; died September 22, 1958, in New York, NY; married Stanley Marshall Rinehart, April 21, 1896 (died, 1932); children: three sons, one daughter. Education: Attended public high school in Pittsburgh, PA; Pittsburgh Training School for Nurses, graduated, 1896.
CAREER: Novelist, short story writer, playwright, and author of nonfiction. Internship at Pittsburgh Homeopathic Hospital, c. early 1890s; full-time writer, beginning 1905. Correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post during World War I; reported presidential nominating conventions.
AWARDS: Litt.D., George Washington University, 1923; Mystery Writers of America Special award, 1953.
Description:The Circular Staircase is perhaps Mary Roberts Rinehart's most famous story. Wealthy spinster Rachel Innes is persuaded by her niece and nephew Gertrude and Halsey to take a house in the country for the summer. Rachel is unaware that the house holds a secret, and soon unexplained happenings and murder follow.
The Bat
The Bat (1917-1920) is a stage adaptation of Rinehart's The Circular Staircase, written in collaboration with Avery Hopwood, the writer of popular Broadway comedies with whom Rinehart had collaborated before. The Bat introduced some new plot complexities into the original novel, especially a master criminal known as The Bat. It also includes plot elements reminiscent of her first Post story, "The Borrowed House" (1909). The Bat shows Rinehart at the height of her powers, and in fact is her greatest work. A work of great formal complexity, The Bat is one of the few mystery stage plays to have the dense plotting of a Golden Age detective novel.
Mary Roberts Rinehart wrote novels, plays, short stories, and works of nonfiction, but she is best known for her "Had I But Known" novels of mystery and suspense, in which a female protagonist narrates the story ending each chapter with a cliffhanger revelation about further dangers to come.
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Quite a few of her titles are available in PLS :
The album / [c1933]
Amazing adventures of Letitia Carberry. [c1911].
The best of Tish. [c1955]
Amazing adventures of Letitia Carberry. [c1911].
The best of Tish. [c1955]
The circular staircase / with introd. by Phyllis A.
Whitney ; bibliography by Jan Cohn ; ill. by Darrel Millsap. [c1908]
Episode of the wandering knife. [c1943.]
The frightened wife : and other murder stories, [c1953]
Haunted lady /. [1942]
The Mary Roberts Rinehart Crime book : The door ; The confession ; The
Whitney ; bibliography by Jan Cohn ; ill. by Darrel Millsap. [c1908]
Episode of the wandering knife. [c1943.]
The frightened wife : and other murder stories, [c1953]
Haunted lady /. [1942]
The Mary Roberts Rinehart Crime book : The door ; The confession ; The
red lamp. [c1957.]
Mary Roberts Rinehart's crime book; The after house ...[and others].
Mary Roberts Rinehart's mystery book : The circular staircase, The man in
Mary Roberts Rinehart's mystery book : The circular staircase, The man in
lower ten [and] The case of Jennie Brice. [1947]
Mary Roberts Rinehart's thriller omnibus. [ c1941.]
Miss Pinkerton : adventures of a nurse detective. [1959]
More Tish / [ c1919.]
My story / a new edition and seventeen new years. [1948]
Sight unseen. [c1921.]
The swimming pool. [1952]
Tish / with illustrations by May Wilson Preston. [1916]
Tish marches on / [1937]
Tish plays the game. [c1926.]
Mary Roberts Rinehart's thriller omnibus. [ c1941.]
Miss Pinkerton : adventures of a nurse detective. [1959]
More Tish / [ c1919.]
My story / a new edition and seventeen new years. [1948]
Sight unseen. [c1921.]
The swimming pool. [1952]
Tish / with illustrations by May Wilson Preston. [1916]
Tish marches on / [1937]
Tish plays the game. [c1926.]
The wall / [ c1938.]
When a man marries; illus. by Harrison Fisher and Mayo Bunker [c1908.]
When a man marries; illus. by Harrison Fisher and Mayo Bunker [c1908.]
Some online resources for free ebooks by this author :
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When television became a popular medium, both The Circular Staircase and The After House were featured as live television drama in the late 1950s.
Mary Roberts Rinehart died in 1958 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery where, according to the official Arlington website, she is remembered as:
Mary Roberts Rinehart- America's first woman war correspondent during World War I for the Saturday Evening Post; wrote mystery novels, including The Circular Staircase and The Bat; in 1921 was referred to as “America's Mistress of Mystery.”
And that, I think, is a grand remembrance for an outstanding woman.
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Author Information:
Mary Roberts Rinehart
Alternative title:
Bat (Motion picture)
Publisher information:
Mineola, NY: Dover Publications 1997, c1908.; ix, 178 p.; 22 cm.
Notes:
Play ; later adapted as novel, The Bat.
Original Version Note:
Originally published: New York :
The Bat
The Bat (1917-1920) is a stage adaptation of Rinehart's The Circular Staircase, written in collaboration with Avery Hopwood, the writer of popular Broadway comedies with whom Rinehart had collaborated before. The Bat introduced some new plot complexities into the original novel, especially a master criminal known as The Bat. It also includes plot elements reminiscent of her first Post story, "The Borrowed House" (1909). The Bat shows Rinehart at the height of her powers, and in fact is her greatest work. A work of great formal complexity, The Bat is one of the few mystery stage plays to have the dense plotting of a Golden Age detective novel. Moreover, the formal properties of the stage medium are completely interwoven with the mystery plot, to form intricate, beautiful patterns of plot and staging of dazzling complexity.
Rinehart and Hopwood's play can be found in the anthology Famous Plays of Crime and Detection (1946), edited by Van H. Cartmell and Bennett Cerf, along with other outstanding plays of its era. (This book also contains good plays by Roi Cooper Megrue, Elmer Rice, George M. Cohan, andJohn Willard.) In 1926, a novelization of The Bat appeared, apparently written by poet Stephen Vincent Benét with little input from Rinehart. This novel version usually appears in paperback under Rinehart's name, without any mention of Hopwood or Benét. I read this novelized version first, and confess I prefer it to the script of the play itself.
Film director Roland West made two versions of the play, a silent film The Bat (1926), and a sound film The Bat Whispers (1930). The link leads to a discussion of West's film techniques
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Mary Roberts Rhinehart's works form a genre of romantic suspense often called "Had I But Known" for the first person narration and the heroine's tendency to call out forbidding clues.
"Had I but known" is a form of prolepsis or foreshadowing that hints at some looming disaster in which the first-person narrator laments his or her course of action which precipitates some or other unfortunate series of actions. Classically, the narrator never makes explicit the nature of the mistake until both the narrator and the reader have realized the consequence of the error. If done well, this literary device can add suspense or dramatic irony; if overdone, it invites comparison of the story to Victorian melodrama and sub-standard popular fiction.[citation needed]
The foreshadowing may be distinguished between, "advance notice":[1] for example, "'Had I but known then what I know now, I would never have set foot on Baron von Rotschnitzel's private yacht.'" or the more subtle, "advance mention":[1] "a 'simple marker without anticipation' intended to acquire significance later in the narrative, through analeptic recovery (75).' [in other words:]...clues"[2]
The phrase is used to refer to a group of Golden Age mystery writers, mostly female, who wrote novels characterized by the use of the "had I but known" plot in which the narrator keeps key pieces of evidence from the police, apparently for the sole purpose of prolonging their work.
The HIBK school is associated with the works of Mary Roberts Rinehart,[2] specifically The Circular Staircase (1908), in which "a middle-aged spinster is persuaded by her niece and nephew to rent a country house for the summer. The house they choose belonged to a bank defaulter who had hidden stolen securities in the walls. The gentle, peace-loving trio is plunged into a series of crimes solved with the help of the aunt. This novel is credited with being the first in the "Had-I-But-Known" school."[3]
“Had-I-But-Known narrators are the ones who hear a stealthy creak at midnight in the tower where the body lies, and, instead of locking their door or arousing the drowsy policeman posted outside their room, sneak off by themselves to the tower and suddenly they hear a breath exhaled behind them,
And they have no time to scream, they know nothing else till the men from the D.A.'s office come in next morning and find them.
...
And when the killer is finally trapped into a confession by some elaborate device of the Had I But Known-er some hundred pages later than if they hadn’t held their knowledge aloof,
Why, they say, why Inspector I knew all along it was he but I couldn’t tell you, you would have laughed at me unless I had absolute proof."[4]
In Murder for Pleasure, the essential 1941 study of the detective story as a literary form, Howard Haycraft listed ten women authors who constituted what he called the “better element”of the so-called HIBK, or Had I But Known, school of mystery fiction, which was founded by Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958) over three decades earlier with the publication of her hugely popular debut novel, The Circular Staircase (1908).
The Had I But Known school of mystery fiction, as it was so dubbed by (mostly male) mystery critics after the term was used by Ogden Nash in a satirical 1940 poem, typically included mysteries with female narrators given to digressive regrets over the things they might have done to prevent the novel’s numerous murders, had they only been able to see the dire consequences of their inaction.
Haycraft’s list of the ten premier Rinehart followers includes several names still fairly well-known to genre fans today, namely Mignon Eberhart, Leslie Ford and Dorothy Cameron Disney, but also more obscure names as well.
Three of these writers, Charlotte Murray Russell and the sisters Constance and Gwenyth Little, have recently had works reprinted and resultingly undergone some reader revival, but the remaining four, Anita Blackmon, Margaret N. Armstrong, Clarissa Fairchild Cushman and Medora Field, remain almost entirely forgotten.
Over the next few weeks I plan to highlight genre work by these forgotten HIBK authors. I begin with Anita Blackmon.
Anita Blackmon (1893-1943) published two mystery novels, Murder a la Richelieu (1937) andThere Is No Return (1938). In the United States, both of Blackmon’s mysteries were published by Doubleday Doran’s Crime Club, one of the mo
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H.I.B.K. (Had I But Known)
By Margaret Lucke
If I'd only known …
Permit me to tweak The LadyKillers' theme for this week just a little. Take out the if and the only, add a but, rearrange a couple of words, and voilà! We have one of the most famous--or should I say infamous?--phrases in mystery literature.
Had I but known.
These words refer to a category of story that was popular in the first half of the twentieth century. The stereotypical book of the Had I But Known (HIBK) school was Gothic in tone and had an innocent or naïve young woman as narrator, giving a first-person account of what happened to her in that spooky old mansion. The HIBK was a foreshadowing device, intended to create suspense by letting readers know that even if this section was dull, things would pick up because the main character was running headlong toward disaster. Had I but known that an evil killer had escaped from the asylum in the village, I never would have gone out by myself for a midnight walk on the moor. Some writers employed the technique in a clunky way, making it too obvious and sometimes a bit silly.
But it's still used today, usually subtly and effectively.
Mary Roberts Rinehart, whom some call the American Agatha Christie, is credited with inventing the HIBK approach in one of her earliest novels, The Circular Staircase, published in 1908. (Rinehart also wrote a popular novel called The Door, in which the butler did it, thus giving the mystery genre another famous phrase.)
Some of the writers who followed Rinehart's footsteps onto the bestseller lists are still known today. Others have faded into obscurity. They include, but are not limited to, Anita Blackmon, Dorothy Cameron Disney, Daphne du Maurier, Mignon G. Eberhart, Medora Field, Leslie Ford, Lenore Glen Offord, and Ethel Lina White.
Readers loved HIBK stories. Critics, not so much. The "Had I But Known" label was applied in derision.
- See more at: http://theladykillers.typepad.com/the_lady_killers/2013/12/hibk-had-i-but-known.html#sthash.Nxp0nHHb.dpuf
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Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Circular Staircase
Mary Robert Rinehart’s The Circular Staircase was an instant best-seller when it was first published in 1908 and is still in print today. Roberts was one of the most widely read writers in the first half of the 20th century. In fact, the largest number of best-selling novels in the United States during this period were written by her. A financial crisis prompted Rinehart to turn to writing and with the publication of The Circular Staircase, she rescued her family from financial ruin. The novel became the basis for a silent film and a play called The Bat, a production that made the Rinehart family wealthy (Cohn 1980, chap. 1).
“Unlike other American women of the time,” observes Cohn,
who found their way to wealth and position in brilliant marriages, Mary Roberts Rinehart made her own success. Her life story, the ambition and the hard work that made possible her progress from genteel poverty to what some have called ‘tycoon-hood,’ may qualify her as America’s first female Horatio Alger. (1980, 3)
Although Rinehart wrote poetry, news stories, articles, and children’s stories, she is remembered today for her mystery novels. Rinehart’s love of adventure inspired her to work as a reporter for the Saturday Evening Post during the war years. She served as the first American female correspondent on the Belgian Front during World War I and became a celebrity on her return home.
The Circular Staircase begins with the move to a large country house. Rachel Innes and her wards – niece Gertrude and nephew Halsey – arrive at Sunnybrook unprepared for the mysterious events that begin to happen after they move in. Over the course of the summer, five unexpected deaths occur. Rachel Innes turns amateur detective and is undeterred by the apparent haunting of their new home.
The novel is famous for introducing the “had-I-but-known” school of detection. Narrator Rachel Innes tells the story thirteen years after the events take place. After spending her first night in the haunted house, Rachel and maid Liddy decide to vacate it. In classic had-I-but-known narrative style, Rachel admits “If we had only stuck to that decision and gone back before it was too late!” (9). This style of hindsight narration intensifies the sense of foreboding that the reader experiences.
Typical of this style of novel, a female character tells her own story. Rachel presents herself as a survivor who can “withstand the dangers of the inner and outer worlds. She knows now that she is strong and capable and she wants to share with us what she has learned” (Maio 1983, 90).
This type of mystery is noted for a number of other features, each of them present in The Circular Staircase: secrets from the past, Gothic elements, old country houses, an emotional rather than strictly intellectual appeal, multiple murders, a romantic interest, menacing characters, ghosts who are eventually found to be bogus, and a rapid succession of chain-reaction events. (Freier 1999, 197; Maio 1983, 82-90).
The isolated twenty-two room mansion, hidden rooms, trap doors, strange noises in the middle of the night, graveyard scenes, and ghostly apparitions are all straight out of the Gothic novel (see my post on the Gothic influence on mystery fiction). But Rinehart presents the narrative in a light-hearted comic tone that satirizes the Gothic elements of the story.
The most engaging part of the novel is the character of the spinster aunt, a woman who has spunk and a delightful sense of humour. The spinster stereotype, observes Cohn,
was a staple of popular American fiction in the latter part of the nineteenth century. By reason of her advanced age, she was no longer restricted to the conventional behavior demanded of single women and, without the responsibilities of a married women, she enjoyed relative freedom” (1980, 44-45).
Readers will love Rachel Innes’s self-deprecating humour and marvelous sense of adventure. Early in the narrative, she admits:
If the series of catastrophes there did nothing else, it taught me one thing – that somehow, somewhere, from perhaps a half-civilized ancestor who wore a sheepskin garment and trailed his food or his prey, I have in me the instinct of the chase. (3)
And after surviving a harrowing summer, she tells us, “I am talking of renting a house next year, and Liddy says to be sure there is no ghost. To be perfectly frank, I never really lived until that summer” (178).
The Circular Staircase has appeared on the Mystery Writers of America’s The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time and The Independent Mystery Booksellers Association’s 100 Favorite Mysteries of the 20th Century. It is not difficult to see why readers continue to enjoy this delightfully comic mystery novel.
Cohn, Ian. Improbable Fiction: The Life of Mary Roberts Rinehart. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980.
Freier, Mary P. “Had-I-But-Known.” In The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing, edited by Rosemary Herbert, 197. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Maio, Kathleen L. “Had-I-But-Known: The Marriage of Gothic Terror and Detection.” In The Female Gothic, edited by Juliann E. Fleenor, 82-90. Montreal, QC: Eden Press, 1983.
Rinehart, Mary Roberts. The Circular Staircase. 1908. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1997.
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