Mary Roberts Rinehart America's Queen of Mystery

Mary Roberts Rinehart (August 12, 1876 – September 22, 1958) was an American writer best known for her mysteries. She published her first mystery novel, The Circular Staircase, in 1908, which introduced the "had I but known" narrative style. Rinehart is also considered the source of "the butler did it" plot device in her novel The Door (1930), although the exact phrase does not appear in her work. 

Her books were wildly popular.  All through the 1920s, Mary Roberts Rinehart's books made the bestseller list. The prolific writer is often compared to Agatha Christie in terms of her career. While it is true that both women wrote books, short stories, an autobiography, essays, and long-running plays (Agatha Christie's The Mouse Trap and Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Bat), I don't really like to do that sort of comparison between writers who were so very different in their approach to the art of storytelling. 

Before going further with this post, I must make the following confession: I am not an unbiased judge of why Christie's books have remained in print and Mary Roberts Rinehart's have not. I am a huge Agatha Christie fangirl. I was once barred from an Agatha Christie trivia contest because I had answered too many of the questions. 

I first discovered Rinehart's books when I ran across The Circular Staircase in an old house I was helping my brother demolish. The book was a bit musty, but you take your books where you can find them in a town with no bookstores or libraries. I took it home and read it that night. I enjoyed the story, but didn't run across another of her books for many years. One book does not a fandom make. I passed the book on to a fellow bookworm in town and didn't think about it again until years later, I discovered another among a stack of other Rinehart first editions. 

It was then that I began to read her work and learn more about this remarkable woman. Rinehart knew what it was like to grow up poor. She worked hard to put herself through nursing school. During WWI, she was a war correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post. She and her husband lost everything in the stock market crash, but her writing success enabled them to recover and prosper. 

Hardship was not entirely behind her, though. In 1946 she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which led to a radical mastectomy. She eventually went public with her story, at a time when such matters were not openly discussed. The interview "I Had Cancer" was published in a 1947 issue of the Ladies' Home Journal; in it, Rinehart encouraged women to have breast examinations. 

Her work reflects a life lived to the fullest. I can understand why the "had I but known" style of writing fell out of fashion, but much of Christie's work is also stilted. If there is a real comparison to be made as to why Agatha Christie still remains popular and Rinehart is less so, it is the detectives they wrote, or rather in Rinehart's case, the lack of a recurring detective in her books. Neither of her recurring characters Hilda Adams or Tish Carberry appear often enough in her books to be considered series characters. 

Time Away from the Everyday

I am sorry that I didn't post this earlier in the week. I have been selfish with my time and traveling to a few historic Florida towns. That is, historic by American standards; we are still a young country. 

There are few things more rejuvenating than taking a little time to relax and spend time with people I love. This week, Sarah and I took a trip into Florida's past with my sister and her friend Tom. Some of the places we went may become settings for short stories or new books. This week, they were a break from the everyday. 

Our first stop was Winter Park, a beautiful town set on the shores of five small, spring-fed lakes. The town dates back to the 1840s when white Americans chased the Seminoles off their native lands and formed the state of Florida. Most of the tribe was relocated to Oklahoma. Those they couldn't catch fled to the Everglades, where they still live. Meanwhile, Winter Park became a winter home for wealthy industrialists of the nineteenth century. 

There is an advantage to having lots of money when building a town. The good citizens of Winter Park had canals dug to connect the lakes and built spacious mansions along the shores. They spared no expense in creating their winter playground. Some of the houses still remain, but many have been torn down by today's wealthy residents who built even bigger homes. The four of us took a tour of the lakes on one of the five custom-built pontoon boats that cruise the canals hourly. The tour is considered one of the most scenic in Florida. There are cypress trees and live oaks growing along the canals that were here when Seminoles walked the lake shores. Today, beautifully landscaped lawns slope down to the water's edge and the campus of Rollins College occupies seventy acres of lakefront property. 

Our next stop was Daytona Beach, the location of one of the oldest automobile races in the world, the Daytona 500. In the 1920s, the race was on the beach. There is still a section of the beach that cars are allowed to drive, but for the safety of the beachgoers the city no longer allows cars to race the length of the shore. The race has been moved to Daytona Speedway, but it is still one of the premier auto races in the county. 

Sarah and I are planning to set one of the Three Snowbird books in Daytona, maybe centered on another popular sport there: speedboat racing. I understand Daytona is one of the more challenging places to race, boats often having "washing machine surf" that they have to just plow through and waves that are five or six feet high. The Professor would love the excitement, but poor Cornelia might have heart failure if he goes out on one of those racing boats.

Our last stop on the trip was Silver Springs and a glass-bottomed boat tour that dates back to the 1800s. Silver Springs is now a state park, and the grounds are beautiful. The shopping pavilion was closed for renovations, much to my sister's disappointment. The tour was wonderful. The deepest of the underwater springs is 85 feet, but the water is so clear that it doesn't appear to be more than a few feet deep. Alligators lounge on the shore of a small island where birds nest. They settle on the ground under the nest and wait, hoping that one of the fledglings will fall and provide them with an afternoon snack. 

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Many movies have been filmed at Silver Springs and some of the props still remain, including a boat that was intentionally sunk for the film Don't Give Up the Ship, and three seven-foot-tall statues of Greek gods that were props for an I Spy episode. There is also a dug-out canoe made of Florida cypress that is older than the United States. A sample of the wood was sent to the University of Florida to try to determine just how long the canoe has been resting at the bottom of the spring.

Now that we are back from the trip, I hope to be back on schedule with the blog next week. In the meantime. I hope you enjoyed hearing about my little adventure into Florida's past.

Signs of the Time

The Gandy Bridge

One of the most difficult problems I struggle with when writing historical mysteries is how to accurately portray the times without having our troubled history take over the story. This week the Three Snowbirds had to cross the Gandy Bridge to question a suspect in St. Petersburg. To understand how a simple drive across a bridge can be a problem, you have to be aware of an ugly historic fact. When the Gandy Bridge was completed in 1924, a car crossing toward St. Petersburg side would see a sign that read “No Jews Wanted Here.” Pow! History just delivered a punch to the gut. 

Okay, history, what do you have to say for yourself?

As it turns out, the anti-Semitic history of St. Petersburg is well documented. Signs at resorts and restaurants that read “Restricted Clientele” or “Gentiles Only” reflected the exclusionary policies of many local institutions. Throughout much of the early and mid-century, the city was considered one of the most anti-Semitic in all of the United States. 

When Sarah and I approached writing Murder at the Million Dollar Pier, we had to take that part of the history of the city into account. The difference in this particular sign is the all-encompassing nature of where it was posted. This was not an individual business or a single institution. The city of St. Petersburg rolled out an unwelcome mat in big black letters. 

Despite the bigotry, the Jewish citizens of St. Petersburg didn't leave or start forming Jews only groups. It wasn't easy. Keeping their Jewish identity in the Sunshine City required a strong will and dogged determination. As a result, the Jewish community in St. Petersburg is still thriving, and the unwelcome sign has rotted away.

Elizabeth MacKintosh, aka Mystery Writer Josephine Tey, aka Playwright Gordon Daviot

Elizabeth MacKintosh, pen name Josephine Tey, was born on July 25, 1896, in Inverness, capital of the Scottish Highlands. Her father was recorded on the birth certificate as a fruiterer. “Strange as it may seem, few of us had ever known the real person,” recalled Mairi MacDonald, a contemporary at Inverness Royal Academy. “We had rubbed shoulders with her in our busy streets; admired her pretty home and picturesque garden—and some had even shared schooldays with her—yet no one enjoyed her companionship, for Gordon Daviot was and wished to be what she herself termed herself, ‘a lone wolf,’ discouraging any attempts at fraternization.” 

In school, she was a reluctant pupil, she preferred playing tic-tac-toe with a neighbor in class, or drawing mustaches and spectacles on portraits of the Kings of Scotland, or scampering off to a cloakroom “where, upon an old set of parallel bars—housed there for no apparent reason—she delighted herself and others by turning somersaults.”

Her first career as a physical training instructor was in her opinion the happiest time of her life. This admission is a rare insight into very private life. She never married, and rarely spoke about herself or her life. According to most sources, including an obituary in the London Times, her teaching career was curtailed by family obligations. After teaching physical training at schools in England and Scotland, she returned to Inverness to care for her invalid father. It was there that she began her career as a writer. She never returned to teaching but her experiences there provided the backdrop for Miss Pym Disposes, set at a physical-training college in the English Midlands. 

She did more than create pen names for herself. Writing life was as compartmentalized and well developed as any of her characters. Elizabeth MacKintosh, Gordon Daviot, and Josephine Tey were distinct personae. Even her correspondence has that chameleon quality: a letter from “Gordon” is quite different in tone from a “Mac” letter or a “Tey” letter. Perhaps her reluctance to meet people stemmed from a need to keep all three of her identities in their individual compartments, a task much easier on paper than in person.

It is no wonder Josephine Tey never belonged to the Detection Club. The social nature of the group would have been difficult for her. She also had no desire to pledge herself to the constraints of the oath they swore. Unlike Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey ignored golden-age British crime fiction rules. The results were brilliant.  During her career as a crime novelist, from The Man in the Queue (1929) to The Singing Sands (published posthumously in 1952), she broke almost all the commandments. 

Her disdain for formulaic fiction is confirmed in the opening chapter of The Daughter of Time (1951). Detective Inspector Alan Grant despairs the books on his bedside table while in the hospital recuperating from a broken leg, among them a writing-by-numbers mystery called "The Case of the Missing Tin-Opener." “Did no one, any more, no one in all this wide world, change their record now and then?” he wonders despairingly.

Her work may have fallen out of favor during the Golden Age of detective fiction, but it stands the test of time. With strong, well-developed characters, and nimble, witty prose, it is well worth revisiting her work.

Tampa Bay Travel in the 1920s

I spend a lot of time doing historical research for my novels. Sometimes the research includes visiting a location or finding an old photograph. At other times the details of a particular day are important. For instance, the current chapter of my WIP is a trip from Tampa to St. Petersburg. Florida was a little different in the 1920s than it is in the 2020s. The Gandy Bridge was new and charged a quarter to each car that crossed the bay. At that time the six-mile-long Gandy was the longest bridge in the world. To put it simply, travel across Tampa Bay was much more time-consuming than it is today. The new bridge cut the driving time between the two cities in half and added an amazing view of Tampa Bay.

The Gandy Bridge was the first, but the Davis Causeway (now the Cortney Campbell Causeway) was in the planning stages.  Davis Construction Company, wouldn't start construction until 1927. David (DP) Davis, was behind the project. His current building efforts included dredging the bay to turn two small islands into three, which could support a planned community complete with golf courses, hotels, apartments, a business district, and private houses. Environmental impact wasn't a consideration during the Florida Land Boom. Builders at the time only worried about how much money they could make.

The Howard Frankland Bridge was a dream that many thought could not be built.  It would be several decades before technological improvements in construction equipment allowed the dream to become reality. Perhaps they should have kept dreaming a while longer.  The bridge opened in 1960 and was soon nicknamed the "Howard Frankenstein Bridge" by the locals because of the many accidents that backed up traffic for hours.