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.