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. 

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.

Helen Reilly aka Abby Kieran

Helen Reilly was born in New York City in 1891. Her father was John Michael Kieran, the president of Hunter College, and her brother, John Kieran, produced the famous Information Please series, a radio program that showcased his encyclopedic learning. Helen married Paul Reilly, an artist and cartoonist, in 1914 before she completed her degree from Hunter. They were an unusual couple for the time, Helen was the main breadwinner for the family. The couple had four daughters, two of whom, Ursula Curtiss and Mary McMullen, followed in their mother’s footsteps as mystery writers. When Helen was asked about the effect of her success on her husband she replied, "I make the living, but he makes living worthwhile."

At the urging of her lifelong friend, William McFee, an eminent author, Reilly began writing detective stories. Almost all of her stories are police procedurals that feature Inspector Christopher McKee and follow the formula of a detailed presentation of a homicide investigation, told from the point of view of the police. It is easy to understand Reilly’s reason for writing this way—her stories were major successes. She wrote thirty-three mysteries in her thirty-year career, as well as three others under the pen name Kieran Abbey. The leading magazines of the time that published popular fiction, such as The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s, often featured her work. She served as president of the Mystery Writers of America in 1953.

She lived in Connecticut for a number of years; this state is the setting of Certain Sleep (1961). After her husband died in 1944, she returned to New York. Although she eventually moved from New York City to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to live with her daughter Ursula Curtiss and Ursula’s family, she always considered herself a native New Yorker. She died on January 11, 1962, continuing to write almost to the end of her life.

Remembering Sue Grafton

Sue Grafton was born on April 24, 1940, in Louisville, Kentucky. Grafton followed her father's advice and moved west to write for Hollywood, and had some success, but the publication of her first Kinsey Millhone novel, A is for Alibi, made her a best-selling author. Her alphabet series is loved by millions, translated into 26 languages, and earned her numerous accolades.

She often claimed that Kinsey was a younger, skinnier version of herself. I've always thought she was more of a younger sister than a true reflection of the author. Kinsey lacked Sue's Kentucky roots, that Southern iron benevolence softened by the lilt of an accent that is pure Kentucky. She has always been very generous in being honest in her advice to writers. I feel very fortunate to have been one of the writers she cautioned to slow down and spend time and attention on learning to write.

One of my most treasured possessions is the three-page letter I received from Sue Grafton after she read the first fifty pages of my manuscript for Circle of Dishonor. It was not entirely flattering. It wasn't intended to be. Grafton took writing seriously and had generously offered to read and critique my work. She returned those fifty pages with editorial marks and comments. Her letter was one Kentucky mystery writer giving advice to another. I took the advice seriously. She showed me how to critically read my own manuscript. I made a number of changes to those fifty pages and used her examples to improve the rest of my book. I am indebted to her for making my work better.

In 2017 the headline read: "Famed  writer Sue Grafton loses battle against cancer."  I cried. I am sure a lot of other readers and writers cried. She was 77 years old and little sister Kinsey was one letter short of a complete alphabet. Her last case, Z is for Zero, will never be finished.

Waif Wander: Mary Fortune (1833-19??)

Mary Fortune is a true woman of mystery. Her series of more than five hundred short detective stories was published in the Australian Journal and spanned more than forty years. At the time hers was the longest-running series in crime fiction. She also pioneered the case book form of writing detective stories, which was later used by Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes stories. Seven of her stories were reprinted as THE DETECTIVE’S ALBUM: TALES OF THE AUSTRALIAN POLICE (1871), which was the first book of detective fiction published in Australia.

Mary also wrote poetry, serialized novels, worked as a journalist, and wrote an unreliable memoir. The latter contributed to the mystery surrounding her life. Nobody really knew who she was. Much of her work was published under the pseudonyms “Waif Wander” or just ‘W.W.” with her real name, identity, and, as W.W., even her gender hidden. In her autobiographical writing, there are a few clues to her life, but both she and the Australian Journal guarded her privacy.

Sadly, her desire for privacy was so pervasive that her death passed without any public attention. The exact date of her death remains a mystery. What little we know about her comes from a book collector, J.K. Moir, who began searching for ‘Waif Wander’ in the 1950s. Through his queries to people who might have known her, he located some manuscript poems and a letter signed "M. H. Fortune." It took another generation and the microfilming and indexing of documents from colonial Australia before more information about ‘Waif Wander’ was discovered.

Among the fragmentary information revealed in her autobiographical writing was the mention that she and her little son, George, immigrated to Australia from Canada in 1855. There was no mention of a husband. However, the clue of her immigration led to the discovery of an 1858 'Goldfields marriage' (a public marriage with no minister) of Mary Helena Fortune, nee Wilson to a mounted policeman named Percy Rollo Brett. His occupation also explained her knowledge of police procedures.

The marriage did not last, and in 1866 Brett married a second time without divorcing her. It seems, though, that Mary was the first person in the couple to commit bigamy. Her first husband, Joseph Fortune, died in Canada in 1861, six years after she and her son moved to Australia. There is no evidence that Joseph ever came to Australia, but in 1856 Mary named him the father of her second son, Eastbourne Vawdey Fortune.

The only surviving physical description of Fortune was part of a police inquiry: “40 years of age, tall, pale complexion, thin build; wore dark jacket and skirt, black hat, and old elastic - side boots. Is much given to drink and has been locked up several times for drunkenness. Is a literary subscriber to several of the Melbourne newspapers.”

What we know of her later life is from the 1909 letter J.K. Moir discovered. She was impoverished and nearly blind. Her magazine contributions stopped altogether in 1913. The Australian Journal granted her an annuity and continued reprinting her Detective Album series through 1919. After that, they hired other writers for the popular series which continued until 1933. She created the police procedural and developed the casebook style while Arthur Conan Doyle, who became famous for it, was still in the nursery.

Perhaps this final note on her death is the saddest commentary on her life. The impoverished author’s funeral was paid for by the Australian Journal and she was buried in someone else’s grave. Her final resting place remains unknown, as does whose name is on the gravestone.