Mystery Techniques: Disappearance Mysteries | Mysterious Visitors | A Famous Mystery Cliche | Collections of Objects | Undercover | Reporters | Dogs | Gangsters
Architecture and Landscape: Line of Sight | Paired Houses | Vertical Architecture | Upper Floors | Water Landscapes
Works: The Man in Lower Ten | The Window at the White Cat | The Valley of Oblivion | Comic Stories and Tish | The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry | Nurse Fiction | The Case of Jennie Brice | The Afterhouse | The Papered Door | Miss Pinkerton: The Novellas | The Curve of the Catenary | Mainstream Fiction | Sight Unseen | The Confession | The Bat | Later Tish stories | The Red Lamp | Return to Mystery Fiction 1930-1953 | The Door | Series Detectives | Miss Pinkerton | The Squad Car short stories | The Inside Story | The Dog in the Orchard | The Splinter | Politics: Mr. Cohen Takes A Walk | The Album | The Wall | The Great Mistake | The Early 1940's Mystery Fiction: 1942-1945 | The Lipstick | Episode of the Wandering Knife | The Scandal | The Yellow Room | The Man Who Hid His Breakfast | The Swimming Pool | The Secret | The Burned Chair | Recommended Reading
A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page
Uncollected short stories:
Tish (available on-line at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3464)
The Confession & Sight Unseen
Miss Pinkerton (1932)
The Album (1933) (Chapters 1 - 9, 12 - 15, 18, 25-26, 32 - 36, 43, 48-49)
Married People
The Great Mistake (1940) (Chapters 1 - 6, end of 10, 11, 12, end of 14, 22, 23, end of 24, end of 25, 26, 32, 33, start of 34)
Familiar Faces: Stories of People You Know
Alibi for Isabel
The Swimming Pool (1952) (Chapters: start of 1, last part of 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, last part of 10, 14, 15, 16, 24, start of 25, 29, 30, 35)
The Frightened Wife
The above is not a complete list of Rinehart's novels and short stories; it just contains my favorite Rinehart works, those I enjoyed reading, and recommend to others. The lists under the collections do not include all the short stories in the book, just the ones I recommend.
Rinehart was highly influential on later mystery writers. Please see articles which discuss such writers in detail:
The article on Victor Kalin discusses his illustrations for Rinehart's books.Rinehart can use disappearance to enable story telling. First someone will disappear. Then clues will be found, later on. Finally their body is discovered, still later. Or perhaps they turn up alive. At each step an investigation takes place. All of this allows detailed storytelling, going through many stages of plot development.
The Long Gone Woman. A variant on a disappearance puzzle also appears in The Red Lamp and The Great Mistake. This is different from those works' main disappearance mysteries. In these subplots, a woman who vanished from the scene many years ago is sought. No one thinks she has been murdered. People just want her current location, to ask her questions. But no one knows where she now is. Both works come to similar solutions of these subplots, with the woman eventually found in a similar location and similar circumstances.
In normal circumstances, there would be little social contact between rich and poor people. This makes such attempted visits all the more unusual and dramatic.
I've dubbed this kind of character the "Mysterious Visitor".
Examples are found in:
Don Morgan's situation in Rinehart's The Great Mistake (1940) (last part of Chapter 33) has aspects of the "mysterious visitor", but is not a pure example.
Freeman Wills Crofts had Mysterious Strangers in some novels. These are based in different approaches than those in Rinehart and her followers:
The solution of Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Door (1930) is notable for being one of only a few real-life examples known to me of an allegedly popular mystery cliché. In The Door, "the butler did it" - although Rinehart did not use this actual phrase.
Less significantly, Rinehart's short story "The Butler's Christmas Eve" (1944) contains two butlers - and one of them is indeed guilty.
Other examples:
In an impressive article, Gareth Rees has unearthed many silent films in which the butler is a criminal. Recommended!
There are also early mysteries where the butler is a suspect, but turns out to be innocent: see Rufus Gillmore's The Alster Case (1914). And the mystery film 11:30 P.M. (Raoul Walsh, 1915). See also Rinehart's short story "The Inside Story" (1934), and her novels Miss Pinkerton, The Swimming Pool.
In The Lesser Antilles Case (1934) (Chapter 4) by Rufus King, joking reference is made to the idea that butlers "are the lads who pull it in the best cases, nine times out of ten." So the idea that "the butler did it" was already a subject of humor in 1934. Rufus King's short story "The Case of the Peculiar Precautions" (1942) treats its butler as a serious suspect.
The objects in The Great Mistake are vivid. They are dramatic pieces of imagery. around which Rinehart has built her tale. The reappearance of these objects in Conway's drawer late in the novel, recapitulates key images from throughout the tale.
Earlier in the same chapter (Chapter 33) the heroine describes Maud Wainwright's fabulous collection of clothes. She also mentions "a book of sketches, each dress shown in color, with the accessories and jewels to go with it." This collection of sketches, itself a series of images, anticipates the Conway collection of objects, key images in The Great Mistake.
Dick Carter in The Door (end of Chapter 7) is suddenly assigned to a story by his newspaper. This is similar to two other key groups in Rinehart, police and nurses, who are also assigned cases. And reporters, police and nurses often make discoveries in her tales.
While the cities in the above tales are not named, they all seem to be more-or-less versions of Rinehart's own city Pittsburgh.
Slick magazines, including Rinehart's main market the Saturday Evening Post, sometimes published gangland tales in this era. Please see my discussion.
Several Rinehart works have ladders, all of which help provide a vertical dimension:
In both The Case of Jennie Brice and The Red Lamp:
The Man in Lower Ten (1906) and The Circular Staircase (1907) are the earliest works by any American author to be still in print as works of entertainment, not as "classics" or "literature". These novels, which combine mystery and adventure, show Rinehart's tremendously vivid powers as a storyteller.
Rinehart has been much and unfairly criticized for scenes in which her heroines wander alone in strange buildings at night. It is not only her women who do this, however: the male lawyer protagonist of The Man in Lower Ten also explores in the dark in that book's finale. What Rinehart was alive to was the poetic possibilities of the night and the dark. The night is always full of discoveries in Rinehart's work. The Man in Lower Ten is also one of the first novels to mention the subconscious (start of Chapter 23).
Symbolism. The settings of these novels can be read as Freudian symbols as well: the train and steel mills of The Man in Lower Ten seem like male symbols, while the house with its circular staircase at its center symbolizes the female body. The two novels have male and female protagonists, respectively.
In "Episode of the Wandering Knife" phallic symbols used for display by a rich man are turned against him and used to frame him for murder. The phallic symbol train in The Man in Lower Ten encounters problems (Chapter 8).
Male Bonding. The Man in Lower Ten (start of Chapter 12) pays tribute to "the friendship between two men". Male bonding will later play a role in The Afterhouse, and such late works as "Test Blackout", The Yellow Room, The Swimming Pool.
Architecture. Both novels include inventive buildings. They represent, at an early date, the interest in architecture that will later be common in Golden Age mystery fiction:
The mystery plot depends on some unfair coincidences. SPOILERS. A subplot looks throughout the novel as if it were closely related to the main mystery puzzle. At the end, the subplot turns out to be entirely unrelated: just a coincidence that happened at the same time.
Like The Window at the White Cat and The Case of Jennie Brice (1912), "The Valley of Oblivion" is a disappearance mystery.
"The Valley of Oblivion" does not seem to be a mystery at first. Rather, it seems like a genteel romance tale, about a young woman and her romantic problems. But soon we learn that a character has mysteriously disappeared. This is a genuine mystery situation. However the tale never veers into the typical conventions of detective fiction. There are no police or professional detectives, no explorations of crime, no conventional suspense, danger or violence. Instead, the conventions of romance fiction are adhered to throughout.
SPOILERS. The disappearance is indeed explained at the tale's end. The solution surprised me. Also surprising: it is the heroine who figures out the solution. She thus becomes the "detective" character in the tale. By contrast, the young man who loves her is a wonderful person, eager to give her love and support. But he is NOT the one who solves the mystery. There is perhaps a feminist implication, with a woman solving the mystery. This anticipates The Great Mistake, with the heroine's boyfriend being a fine person, but with the heroine doing detective work and the hero not at all.
Rinehart achieved success on Broadway and as a novelist almost simultaneously; for the next 45 years she would remain one of America's most popular authors. The immediate effect on her was a swerve into comic fiction for the next five years (1908-1913). She stopped appearing in the low paying pulps, and started to write for the commercially premier magazines. Much of her fiction during this period was in the form of long short stories. Her first sale to the Saturday Evening Post was "The Borrowed House" (1909), a long comic story about the wild adventures of some British suffragettes. Rinehart was a feminist, and marched for women's suffrage during this era.
Tish. The next year she created Tish, a middle aged spinster who would be the center of a series of comic long short stories for the next 30 years. Tish and her friends Aggie and Lizzie do all the things largely forbidden to the women of their time, race motor cars, pilot dirigibles, drive ambulances in World War I France, do stunt work in silent pictures and hunt for sharks and grizzly bears. Underneath the delightful comic surface of these tales is a brilliant feminist vision, and the series of five Tish books is a masterpiece of humor.
Most of the finest Tish stories have been collected in an omnibus aptly titled The Best of Tish (1955). In fact, except for "My Country Tish of Thee -" (1916), all of the really good Tish stories are in this collection.
None of the stories in the first Tish collection, The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry, made it into The Best of Tish, and in truth they are not as good as the later Tish tales.
Bab. Rinehart also wrote a book of long comic tales about a 17-year-old teenager Bab, Bab: A Sub-Deb (collected 1916). Bab is not quite old enough to be a debutante, so in the jargon of the 1910's, she's a "sub-deb". I found the Bab tales leaden, and nowhere as good as the Tish stories, when I read the book decades ago. But it is clear from the Internet that many people enjoy them. They were made into a series of movies, starring a very young Helen Hayes, no less, as Bab.
Hospital Mystery. It combines three strands of Rinehart's writing: it has a hospital and nursing background, it is a comic tale of Tish, and it also has mystery elements throughout. This mystery plot is atypical of the Tish stories, most of which are not constructed as mysteries.
It is perhaps noteworthy as an early example of a mystery involving a hospital and nurses, later a favorite setting of the Sarah Keate novels by Rinehart's follower Mignon G. Eberhart, and like them, full of spooky events at night.
Mystery Plot. It is an interesting curiosity, but not one of Rinehart's better mystery works, with some unexplained coincidences in the solution.
The plot has some affinities to Rinehart's novel, The Afterhouse (1913).
BIG SPOILERS. The solution breaks down the line between humans and animals, fusing the two. One can find fusions of the animal and the human in the 1910's films of directors Louis Feuillade and Allan Dwan.
SPOILERS. Tish will sit on a brass candlestick (Chapter 7), anticipating the mother sitting on the knife in "Episode of the Wandering Knife" (1943).
Mystery Writers. The story has a nice discussion of Conan Doyle's mystery technique (Chapter 4), one of the few homages in Rinehart's work to another mystery author. Later on, there are references to Edgar Allan Poe (Chapter 10).
See also:
Problems. The novella has serious problems. It is constructed as a mixture of horror and humor. The horror is grim, and just no fun to read about. The bad events that engulf likable nurse Ruth Blake are especially depressing (summarized in Chapter 19). Later tales about Tish will be much more comic and upbeat.
A single-sentence description of a black man shows him doing things that are a racist stereotype (Chapter 19). This too is a serious problem.
Love Stories includes four fine stories dealing with nurses and hospital life, reflecting Rinehart's own training as a nurse. "Jane" and "In the Pavilion" are fairly comic, but most of the other tales are serious looks at nursing. Although most of the tales involve romance, they are not sappy, instead concentrating on the serious side of nursing as a profession.
In the Pavilion. "In the Pavilion" (1912) anticipates later Rinehart works:
"In the Pavilion" was a source for the silent film The Glorious Fool (E. Mason Hopper, 1922), now apparently lost. It featured big star Richard Dix as the hero Billy Grant.
Sanctuary. Rinehart would write another nurse short story as late as "Sanctuary" (1936). The nurse in "Sanctuary" will have character elements recalling Rinehart's nurse-detective Miss Pinkerton.
The nurse lives in a "small and dreary room": presumably all she can afford on her salary as a working woman. This recalls working woman Florence Gunther's poverty-stricken room in The Door. Women were clearly not paid much, even after years of hard work.
Another nurse regards the heroine as "queer". One wonders if there is a gay subtext.
The flood affects buildings, both inside and out. Rinehart's description of the flood is thus architectural, a favorite Rinehart interest. The flood description combines this with water, another major Rinehart subject.
Victor Kalin did two excellent cover paintings, for two different American paperback editions of The Case of Jennie Brice. Both show the flood. They are atmospheric and architectural.
The landlady sets up a temporary kitchen on a higher floor, because her real kitchen is flooded. This anticipates scenes in The Yellow Room (Chapter 2), where the heroine and servants try to get the kitchen going again in the house shut-down by wartime and its rationing. Both have resourceful women trying to reestablish a cooking routine, in the midst of very difficult circumstances.
Related books:
Sleuths. The rival sleuths, amateur Mr. Holcombe and newsman Mr. Howell, recall the rivalry between detectives Mr. Barnes and Robert Leroy Mitchel in Rodrigues Ottolengui.
Mystery Plot. The Case of Jennie Brice contains an archetypal mystery situation: when a wife in a bickering couple disappears, allegedly gone away on a visit, a neighbor suspects that the husband has actually murdered her. This is the "Rear Window" plot, made famous in that 1942 tale by Cornell Woolrich. In The Case of Jennie Brice, the suspicious person is the landlady who runs the boarding house where the couple stays.
SPOILERS. The solution to The Case of Jennie Brice has both comic and tragic aspects. The comic aspects (Chapter 15) recall the comic solution to the disappearance subplot in The Window at the White Cat. However, the solution in The Case of Jennie Brice has spectacular features that go far beyond anything in The Window at the White Cat.
Periscope. The periscope is a fascinating development (Chapters 7, 8, 10). It anticipates the mirror surveillance device in the movie serial Judex (Louis Feuillade, 1916).
The periscope is perhaps loosely linked to the way the heroine of The Door can survey her house through "lines of sight" (Chapter 1) and a mirror (Chapter 2).
Links to The Door. Versions of characters in The Case of Jennie Brice will return in The Door (1930) - although they have different names and are not technically the same characters:
Society and Class. The landlady heroine, her boarders and friends are mainly people without much money. They certainly seem poor. However, few of them seem to be typical members of the working class, such as factory workers, dock laborers or office clerks. Instead, they seem to be be more "white collar people in low-paying professions": the theatrical people who are the main denizens of her boarding house, a young reporter, a schoolteacher. These are (very) lower middle class, rather than the proletariat.
Consequently, The Case of Jennie Brice does not really build up a portrait of the poor or the working class.
Two young women eventually make appearances, who are more working class: farm woman Eliza Schaeffer (Chapter 10) and stenographer Alice Murray (Chapter 13). Both are self-employed businesswomen, with very small businesses: Schaeffer sells chicks from her farm to poultry raisers, Murray is a self-employed stenographer who works from home and who takes on small jobs for customers. These are both working class, and proprietors of small businesses. Schaeffer also works as postmistress of her small town. And Timothy Senft has a very small business selling dishes from his shanty-boat (Chapter 8). The landlady herself is a poor woman running a small business, her boarding house.
Ellery Queen will later use a similar approach, with "typical working Americans" in his tales usually being lower middle class people with small businesses, rather than factory workers.
The Case of Jennie Brice opens with a brief description of the Pittsburgh "railroad riots" of 1877. The words "strike", "labor" and "union" are not mentioned, and no references to unions occur in The Case of Jennie Brice. And although Pittsburgh is a major center of industry, we do not see railroad workers or factory employees in the novel.
I am not trying to condemn The Case of Jennie Brice. I enjoyed reading about these theater people, newsmen and "poor entrepreneurs without money" like Schaeffer, Murray and Senft that populate the book. They are a colorful bunch. Perhaps Rinehart thought they were more entertaining than the typical working poor. Still, we do not see steel mill workers, men in railroad yards, office clerks or cleaning ladies scrubbing floors in The Case of Jennie Brice: the actual bulk of the working poor of Pittsburgh.
Much sympathy is expressed in The Case of Jennie Brice for people from "good families" who have declined into poor-paying jobs, such as the landlady and reporter Mr. Howell. Little sympathy is expressed for life-long members of the working class or the poor.
Herbert Spencer. The right-wing philosopher Herbert Spencer is mentioned (end of Chapter 7). However, it is not his views on politics that are cited, but on cause-and-effect.
Mr. Holcombe is typical of the self-taught amateur intellectuals who were especially attracted to Herbert Spencer's writings. Spencer was a huge best-seller in the 19th Century. He was perhaps already in decline with the public in 1912.
An influence from Doyle?. Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tale "The Adventure of the Red Circle" (1911) has some vague similarities to The Case of Jennie Brice (1912):
Mystery Plot. Among the biggest problems of The Afterhouse is the lack of mystery plot ingenuity. The Afterhouse is indeed a murder mystery: there is a killing by an unknown person, then at the book's end we learn whodunit. But there is very little more to the mystery puzzle, with few complicating features.
And there is little actual detective work. The Afterhouse lacks a strong detective figure. The hero takes a few simple precautions to protect evidence. But he never figures out much about the mystery.
Perhaps the lack of mystery plot features or detective work is deliberate. The Afterhouse might be designed more to be a suspense novel, rather than primarily a mystery. However, this does not make the book better or more interesting.
Male Bonding. Among the most appealing aspects of The Afterhouse is the friendship between the hero and McWhirter (Chapters 1, 23, 24). This is a friendship between equals: both are the same age, both have just graduated from medical school, both are equally broke-but-industrious young men. Rinehart will return to idealized male bonding between the hero and friends in The Yellow Room.
Leaders?. Unfortunately, this friendship, while showing the virtue of loyalty, has a questionable aspect. The friend idolizes the hero, and thinks the hero should be a leader of men, especially in a military context (Chapter 1). Later, the hero is shown acclaimed by the working class ship-crew as a natural leader, someone they want in charge of them (Chapter 7, middle of Chapter 9). This comes uncomfortably close to the leadership cults developed around sinister dictators like Hitler and Stalin. One also wonders if working class men like the crew "naturally" want men from middle class families like the hero bossing them. Especially as they are experienced seamen and he is not. Perhaps this is just propaganda for class hierarchies.
Racism. The Afterhouse is blatantly racist in its treatment of the black butler on-board ship. And dubious and questionable in its portrait of a Jewish lawyer. These are major flaws, that cause me not to recommend it.
Unhappy Marriages. The heroine of "The Papered Door" sticks by her criminal husband no matter what. He is thoroughly rotten, but she is mindlessly loyal to him anyway. The tale itself critiques this point of view, with a lawman friend of hers arguing she would be better off without him. Her loyalty makes "The Papered Door" a depressing read.
"The Papered Door" is an early example in Rinehart of an unhappy marriage, caused by a spouse shackled to a difficult or downright bad partner. Later mainstream tales Rinehart wrote, such as A Light in the Window (1947) and mainstream short stories in Married People, often look at such failed marriages. "The Papered Door" shows that Rinehart explored this subject as far back as 1914. "The Papered Door" anticipates A Light in the Window in showing the pain a husband's adulteries cause his wife.
"The Papered Door" makes a bitter, perhaps feminist claim. It says children, especially girls, are "born only to suffer". And that "Boys grew into men" and "Violent, horrible things happened, because they were men."
Architecture. We can have some polite applause for the subplot about the door of the title. This shows Rinehart's interest in architecture. "The Papered Door" recalls The Circular Staircase in featuring a hidden room.
The title "The Papered Door" anticipates the title of Rinehart's The Door. But their plots are not close.
"The Papered Door" got the cover of Collier's magazine on its first publication. The well-done cover shows the papered door of the title.
Film Version. "The Papered Door" was made into a 1915 silent film. Its star Ruth Stonehouse also made in 1915 a film of The Alster Case (1914) by Rufus Gillmore. Ruth Stonehouse was a prolific actress who also sometimes got to write and direct films.
Rinehart's Miss Pinkerton nurse detective has affinities with the scientific detectives of Freeman and Arthur B. Reeve, then at the height of their popularity. Both of these stories deal with medical subjects.
"The Buckled Bag" and "Locked Doors" were included in a large Rinehart collection in 1925. This made them widely available in book form. One suspects they might have influenced the nurse-detective tales Mignon G. Eberhart wrote starting in the later 1920's. The two tales are also included in an omnibus entitled Miss Pinkerton (1959), the easiest place to find them today. It is in this volume that I read them.
The Buckled Bag. The heroine's decision to become a detective (Chapter 1) recalls the heroine's famous declaration of loving her adventure, at the end of The Circular Staircase.
SPOILERS. The strange apparition of a hand on the staircase in "The Buckled Bag" (near the start of Chapter 3) will return in:
"The Buckled Bag" goes on to tell how nurse Hilda Adams met detective Patton, how she got her detective job from him, and her first case. It is thus what comic books would later call an "origin story".
Society. It also has some strong left-wing criticism of social organization, with a depiction of the exploitation of the working class, and their appalling living conditions. This is quite unusual for the normally Republican Rinehart.
The story looks at the somewhat wild social life of the upper classes, which are beginning to resemble the Jazz Age to come, in the 1920's. In this it resembles the title story of Arthur B. Reeve's The Social Gangster (1915).
Like "The Sixth Sense" (1915) in Reeve's collection, Rinehart's story offers a vivid look at the period in which American life was increasing bound up with the war raging in Europe, even though America was still neutral in the conflict.
Hidden Situation. Some of Rinehart's scientific mysteries, such as "Locked Doors", the late Miss Pinkerton novella "The Secret", and The Curve of the Catenary, share a common structural approach. In these, something strange and mysterious is going on - but what? The reader is challenged to figure out some underlying situation that is hidden from view. In these stories, the situation has a scientific basis. There are also non-scientific Rinehart puzzlers, such as The Circular Staircase and The Swimming Pool, which also center around hidden situations, although in these novels, the situations are not science-oriented. In all of these mysteries, the hidden situation is more important than who did the crime, or alibis or clues pointing to some culprit. There are also some hidden situations, less central, but still playing a role in their novel's plot mix, in such works as The Album and The Great Mistake.
This "hidden situation" approach has some consequences. One the one hand, the stories are built around genuine mysteries, with the reader constantly being challenged to figure out the mysterious situation behind the tale's events. On the other hand, it removes Rinehart from the type of mystery story practiced by G. K. Chesterton, Christie, Carr and Queen, in which individual suspects and their ability to commit a crime are paramount. This structural difference between Rinehart and more mainstream authors of detective fiction is at least as significant in defining Rinehart's approach, as are the Had I But Known aspects of Rinehart's writing.
The hidden situation also enables some unusual treatment of characters not found in other authors. Since many Rinehart books are built around a Big Secret, it is possible to define characters in terms of their relationship to the secret. Did they cause the secret situation? Did they learn about it, and are now trying to cover it up to protect someone? Have they discovered some secret clue to the hidden situation, and are now trying to track down the truth? Characters have all these sorts of secret knowledge of the hidden situation in Rinehart. The narrator soon realizes that the characters are concealing something - but what they are concealing does not come out till the end of the tale, or at least, the second half of the story.
Blackout. The failure of the electrical power grid, plunging the city into blackout, recalls the way the electric company turns out the power after a curfew time in The Circular Staircase. Both situations cause characters to wander around in darkness: a favorite Rinehart situation.
Source. The sole easily available source today of The Curve of the Catenary is a 1939 anthology, The Mystery Book. One suspects that Rinehart might (or might not) have revised this version, from the original magazine appearance (which I have not seen).
According to her biographer Jan Cohn, Rinehart often suffered horribly from depression during these years. Her husband Dr. Stanley Rinehart bitterly resented his wife's commercial success. He seems to have used his medical degree and general intellectual skills as a weapon to demonstrate his mental superiority to his wife, the trashy author of popular fiction, and pushed her to write "serious literary works". By contrast, Rinehart had a happy relationship with her three sons. Motherhood is always depicted in glowing terms in Rinehart's fiction, although often shown to be very hard work, while marriage is an unmitigated horror story. Husbands are always shown to be male chauvinist pigs who are cold hearted, philanderers, men intolerant of their wife's career, who have to have their own ways in the smallest details. The best of these mainstream tales are from the 1930's and in the collection Married People. Rinehart also wrote a number of powerful tales about wife beating long before it became a feminist issue in the 1980's.
As early as "The Amazing Adventure of Letitia Carberry" (1911), Rinehart was talking about spiritualism in her mysteries, but in that story it is just a red herring - no actual supernatural events occur. Spiritualism is treated comically there, but with dead seriousness in "Sight Unseen" and The Red Lamp.
Society. "Sight Unseen" opens with a look at the group holding the seance. These are a group of middle-aged friends, who regularly gather to discuss politics, the arts, and anything else they find interesting. They are far from Bohemian: they are a group of upper middle class residents of an upscale, if conventional, neighborhood. Their group, dubbed the Neighborhood Club, resembles today's library book clubs and discussion groups. They are at once more intellectual and more middle class, than some of the Society types common in Rinehart novels. I found Rinehart's account interesting, and wish it extended beyond the opening (Chapter 1). I also wish Rinehart had written about such people more often.
We learn briefly that one of the members is a doctor, who is concerned with "the responsibility of the state to the sick poor" (Chapter 1). This echoes the social consciousness of The Curve of the Catenary. However, "Sight Unseen" does not delve as deeply into such matters as The Curve of the Catenary.
The narrator Horace, a member of Neighborhood Club, is interested in city politics. This recalls The Window at the White Cat.
The murder victim and the suspects come from a different milieu than the Neighborhood Club. They are younger, looser in morals, go to dances. They recall the a bit the fairly wild pre-Jazz Age types in The Curve of the Catenary.
Links to The Circular Staircase. The opening premise of "The Confession" recalls that of Rinehart's The Circular Staircase. Both have:
There are two explanations to the mysterious events of the early chapters:
Some of the above ideas have technological dimensions. We also get a look at the phone as machinery (Chapter 2). All of this brings "The Confession" into the realm of Scientific Detection.
Anticipating The Red Lamp. A document, in this case a letter, is also discovered in a house in The Red Lamp (Chapter entitled June 27th). The letter found in The Red Lamp has sinister information in it, like the document in "The Confession".
Throughout the story, the heroine keeps referencing her journal, and giving dates from it for when things happened. This anticipates The Red Lamp, much of which consists of the hero's journal, and the dated entries it contains. The succession of dated events forms a backbone for the story, in both works.
Links to other Rinehart. The Case of Jennie Brice opens with a brief mention of a basement fruit-closet: a place that people used to store home-canned fruit and similar items. Such a fruit-closet plays a bigger role in "The Confession".
Line of Sight. Maggie observes Miss Benton's activities in a mirror, without Miss Benton's realizing she is being watched (near the end of Chapter 1). This is a line of sight: what Maggie can see when she is standing in a certain place. Such lines of sight return in The Door.
Architecture. As soon as the heroine tells how much she hates the phone calls, she also admits she hates the back hall corner where the phone is located (Chapter 1). This brings that Rinehart favorite, architecture, into the atmosphere around the phone.
The heroine also says that she dislikes having to go downstairs at night to answer the phone calls. In a simple way, this is an example of the vertical architecture that runs through Rinehart's works.
Water Landscape. Early on, the heroine says she rented the house, in part because she liked a nearby pasture with a brook in it. However, this pasture is never referred to again, and plays no role in the mystery.
Telephone. "The Confession" has interesting comments on the telephone, considered as both technology and an institution. As the tale points out, the phone is this country household's only point of contact with the outside world. 1917 was too early for most people to have radio, let alone TV or the Internet. A few wealthy financiers had telegraph lines in the home, and ticker tapes, but most regular Americans did not.
Willie says the phone is the women's only source of "news," too. He must be referring to local news. The women do have access to an evening newspaper, we learn later, which presumably has national and world events.
Nerve Specialist. The young "nerve specialist" Martin Sprague in "The Confession" is close to what we today would call a psychiatrist. His explanations about repressed memories seem distinctly Freudian, although Freud is not explicitly mentioned.
The nerve specialist's ideas about the mystery are wrong, wrong, wrong. He keeps coming up with explanations that deny anything real is going on, suggesting instead that women are imagining things (middle of Chapter 1, middle of Chapter 2). He keeps saying it is all in the head of various (female) characters. Such shrink characters will pop up later in countless books, movies and TV shows. "The Confession" is an example of such a character at an early date.
There is perhaps a feminist subtext, with a male authority figure constantly denying that women's experiences are real or serious.
Sexuality. "The Confession" is remarkably explicit when describing the characters' sex lives. It uses polite euphemisms, that get past censors. But it describes what is going on with the characters in unmistakable terms.
Elderly Miss Benton is clearly a virgin. She is described early on as "unspotted". Later people say she is "still at heart a girl".
The brother is a sexually indulgent roue. He dies of paresis (he is called "paretic" in the middle of Chapter 2). While that medical condition has many possible causes today, largely non-sexual, in 1917 it was most associated with men dying of untreated syphilis.
Nursing. Miss Benton spends much of her life nursing sick relatives. "The Confession" says she should of been having children, instead. This nursing is seen as an activity that exploits Miss Benton, and robs her of a normal life.
Rinehart trained as a nurse, and nurses run through her fiction. "The Confession" offers a negative look at nursing, especially when it is done by unpaid relatives pressured into the role.
Cheap Rent. The house is offered to the heroine at amazingly cheap rent, to lure her into taking it. The reader is far more suspicious of this, than is the guileless heroine. This sort of gambit will recur in later mysteries, often humorous ones:
Nostalgia for High Society. "The Confession" occasionally reminiscences about the old days, when Miss Benton was a leader of High Society in her town. Such memories of a High Society past will recur in more elaborate forms in The Swimming Pool. In both works they are ambiguous: it is unclear at first whether the old way of life is good or bad.
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, and John 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.
Gender. Many sleuths in traditional detective fiction stand outside of the world of heterosexuality. The same is true of those in the novel version of The Bat:
The Arts. Cornelia has experienced "the world of art and books" over her lifetime (start of Chapter 2). This interest in the arts is not something one associates with Rinehart heroines. Only in Rinehart's last novel The Swimming Pool do we have a writer heroine.
The Bat Tokens. The Bat "signs" his crimes, by leaving behind a small piece of bat imagery (Chapter 1). Rinehart and Hopwood were hardly the first writers to use such a gambit. Robert Sampson, in his history of pulp fiction Yesterday's Faces, attributes this approach to Frank L. Packard. Packard's The Adventures of Jimmie Dale (1914-1915) has his gentleman thief leave behind small gray seals to sign his crimes; the thief is known as The Gray Seal to the press. This device clearly spread, as Sampson pointed out, from Packard to other pulp writers.
In The Adventures of Jimmie Dale one of the hero's secret identities is an underworld character called "Larry the Bat". This might be the origin of the name of Rinehart and Hopwood's the Bat.
Film Versions. 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.
Other Tish stories of the Twenties are memorable, especially "Tish Plays The Game" (1921) and "The Baby Blimp" (1922), which get the ladies involved in athletics and Hollywood stunt work, respectively. Tish had previously encountered the film industry in "My Country Tish of Thee -" (1916), where a crew is filming in Glacier Park at the same time Tish is taking a vacation there. Tish expresses strong reservations about the moral character of 1916 motion pictures, in a way that eerily echoes today's anti-film moralists.
"Hijack and the Game" (1925) involves our heroines in bootleg booze smuggling, and is not as good. But the passages dealing with life on the water are surrealistically inventive, like the opening flood sequences of The Case of Jennie Brice (1912).
"Hijack and the Game" reflects Rinehart's real life enthusiasm for wilderness vacations. This story recycles to good effect some ideas Rinehart first used in a less successful earlier Tish tale, "Tish's Spy" (1915). Both stories:
Rinehart is inventive contrasting the maiden ladies with the young Flapper; the comparisons are often unexpected. It is a sort of woman's inside point of view on both roles. Both women have different kinds of freedoms. The Flapper can defy Victorian taboos. But the maiden ladies often can ignore conventions of gender, and dress in gender neutral clothes and do as they please, something that the femininity-obsessed Flapper cannot. There are feminist opportunities in both roles, and Rinehart enjoys seeing women take advantage of both.
Rinehart published her last Tish stories in 1936-1937. The best is "Strange Journey", whose ocean setting once again unleashes a surrealistic streak in Rinehart's imagination.
The Red Lamp is an uneven book. Its best feature: Its first half (up through the Chapter titled August 5th) often makes absorbing reading, with good storytelling. It features a Rinehart strength: water landscapes. The well-done landscape sections also are the main parts that advance the mystery plot.
Weaknesses include a mystery solution with many problems, as discussed below.
And the relentless promotion of the supernatural is hard to take, for non-believers in the supernatural like myself. The book can seem like a long commercial promoting dubious ideas about the supernatural and psychic phenomena.
Should you read The Red Lamp? Ultimately, I decided not to include the book in the Recommended Works at the start of this article. It has too many liabilities: a boring second half, a dubious solution, and all that promotion of the supernatural. Still, the first half is often interesting.
Landscape. The area around the house and its seashore is an interestingly detailed landscape. So is the bay as a whole. Both areas are examples of a Rinehart specialty: water landscape. Rinehart keeps extending these two landscapes throughout the story, adding more detail (Introduction, the Chapters titled June 22, June 24, June 26, June 28, June 30, July 2nd, July 6th, July 8th, July 11th, July 15th, July 31st, August 1st, August 5th).
Other landscapes, inland and far from the sea, involve various attacks. One includes a culvert (July 14th, 16th). A second landscape has clues (July 22, July 25). Both areas are investigated, after their introduction. This too makes them sites of ongoing development, like the water landscapes.
Landscape sections are also often episodes that advance the mystery-and-crime plot of the book. This makes them doubly interesting. Rinehart would use a similar "architecture and landscape combined with plotting" approach in The Swimming Pool.
By contrast, most of the supernatural or psychic aspects of the novel are NOT closely linked to landscape. This is fine by me. It means that these excellent landscape sections combine two things I admire, landscape and mystery plotting, and are mainly free of something I despise, the supernatural.
Architecture. Rinehart keeps the architecture simple, concentrating on landscape instead. But the book immediately calls attention to the two most important rooms in the house, the den and library (Introduction). They are different by being older than the rest of the house. And they are the locus of mystery in the house. The old vs new parts of the house are some of the paired spaces that run through Rinehart.
The Gun Room. The gun room is also an interesting place (Introduction). It is at the end of a series of rooms, like the title staircase in The Circular Staircase. Rinehart seemed to find such series of rooms interesting - and I do too.
The gun room is mainly seen from outside the house. People enter the house from outdoors, through the gun room window (see the Chapters titled July 27th and August 10th). In effect, this makes the gun room window part of the outdoor landscape, in the broad sense of the term. The same is true of various verandas on the outside of houses, where people sit outdoors.
Mystery Plot: Suspects. The Red Lamp is constructed so that there are few, if any, obvious suspects. Suspects only emerge with difficulty throughout the course of the plot. The lack of any apparent suspect is one feature that makes the case difficult to solve. And the cases that are eventually built up against various suspects show some ingenuity - they are far from obvious.
On can contrast this with the numerous mysteries in which a circle of suspects is known from the start. For example, the book known as Dumb Witness or Poirot Loses A Client (1937) by Agatha Christie. The six suspects are the people who benefit under the wills made by the wealthy victim. Both the reader and detective Hercule Poirot know who these suspects are almost from the start of the story.
Mystery Plot: Solution. BIG SPOILERS in this section.
The cleverest part of the solution is the identity of the criminal. This is well-concealed. The concealment is part of the "paucity of suspects" aspect than runs throughout the novel.
Other aspects of the solution are a mess. Motivation is thin. The sheep killings turn out to be something the killer did just to distract and confuse. So they are not explained logically, or given any interesting reason.
And Uncle Horace's demise, often investigated as a murder throughout the book, turns out to have been caused by illness instead. This is an anti-climax. So it and the sheep killings, the tale's most dramatic mysteries, turn out to have nothing behind them.
The Lamp. The red lamp often glows with an eerie red light. This is associated with supernatural elements in the tale. Lights show up in the crime plot, too. Even though I'm not a supernatural fan, lights make interesting imagery. So do their color aspects.
The effects recall a bit the imagery in William Hope Hodgson.
Where Is the Story Set?. The Red Lamp is set somewhere on the Eastern seacoast of the United States. Beyond that, it is hard to say. Young Halliday has a job in Boston waiting for him when he graduates from law school (June 30th). This would be most plausible if the tale were set in New England or maybe New York. The very traditional university where the narrator teaches sounds vaguely Ivy League, also consistent with New England / New York / New Jersey.
There is no regional "local color" in The Red Lamp. The characters have standard American names, that could be anywhere in the US.
The setting is clearly NOT the South. The race of the characters is not specified: meaning, according to the dubious convention of the times, that they are all white.
Education. Rinehart paints a negative picture of literary education at the hero's university (June 16th). He teaches English literature. The Red Lamp shows him trying to teach this subject to bored, uninterested undergrads. It seems futile. One gets the impression that the students are upper class, sociologically elite young men from the Best Families, who are bored by school.
In fact, nothing good or productive seems to be coming out of this university. The professors don't seem to do any research, and the students don't seem to learn much. Nor is America as a whole shown doing anything worthwhile. The working class farmers and servants work hard, but seem to have no interests other than promoting superstition. The hero's wife spends her copious free time sewing and taking routine photos. Young Halliday has nothing to look forward to but a low-paying starter job. It's a dismal portrait, far from the Roaring Twenties image we have today of this era.
One can contrast this view of "education as pointless in an Ivy-League-ish school" with Sinclair Lewis' enthusiastic depiction of education in a Midwestern state university in Arrowsmith (1925). Lewis' gung-ho fictional state "University of Winnemac" is explicitly contrasted with upper class Harvard, which Lewis depicts as an anemic "select college for young gentlemen". As a State school, Winnemac would attract far more lower class students than Harvard or the university in The Red Lamp.
The undergrads in The Red Lamp are bored even by famous writers like Milton and Coleridge. By contrast the students in Arrowsmith are energetically studying far more obscure subjects like Provencal poetry, Sanskrit and Matthew Arnold. More power to them!
Problems. The Wall and The Yellow Room, while imperfect, are considerably better than The Door. They benefit from:
Howard, Katherine, Wallie and Judy in The Door are a rich dysfunctional family who make me want to flee to the hills every time they show up. At least Howard works for a living, which is more than you can say for any of the other upper class characters in The Door.
The rest of the article will be about the novel's positive accomplishments.
Amateur Detectives. On the positive side, Judy and Katherine do good work as amateur detectives in various sections: Judy in part of the Florence Gunther investigation (Chapter 11), Katherine throughout the will subplot. Both Judy and Katherine shows persistence in their detective work, in face of discouragement: something the book finds admirable.
Architecture and Landscape. As is often the case in Rinehart, architecture and landscape are among the best features of The Door.
The opening gives an interesting look at the architecture of the house (Chapters 1, end of 2, 3, 4). Like The Album to come, the architecture has a 3D quality, with the vertical dimension being stressed, along with the two horizontal ones. See: the well over the lavatory, the staircase. The landscape outside the house also has vertical dimensions, with a ravine located behind the house.
A housemaid's closet opens into the well (Chapter 3). A housemaid's closet will also play a role in The Album. Both closets are in upper floors of the house.
Like The Album and The Wall, the grounds surrounding the house play key roles in the mystery. In The Wall, these surrounding areas are aquatic. In The Door and The Album they are dry land.
The opening of The Door stresses lines of sight: what one can see in the house from certain points of view. These "lines of sight" are closely linked to the architecture. These "lines of sight" fascinated me, when I first read The Door as a child.
The heroine uses the house's speaking tubes to conduct an audio surveillance of the house (last part of Chapter 22). This is like the "lines of sight", only dealing with sound rather than vision.
The sewer entrance (Chapter 5) recalls the culvert in The Red Lamp. Both are dramatic features in outdoor landscapes. Both have large openings that allow people to enter.
The well in the mansion over the bathroom, the sewer entrance and the speaking tubes can all be seen as female symbols. All are linked to the mansion. By contrast, the hotel architecture in the will subplot doesn't seem to have any female symbolism. (The title staircase in The Circular Staircase also seems like a female symbol.)
The Will Subplot. Also good is a subplot about a mysterious will (mystery set forth in Chapter 16, architecture and context described in Chapter 20, solved in Chapter 30, with a bit more in Chapter 31). These sections together make up what essentially is a short story, embedded in the larger novel. They take up around 25 pages in a paperback edition of the book.
There is some ingenuity about the title door in the subplot about the will. It shows Rinehart's architectural orientation as a plot creator. The entire will subplot is firmly based in the architecture of the hotel.
The Mathematics of Shape. Rinehart uses the word "hypotenuse" to describe the triangular lot next to the mansion (near the start of Chapter 4). This recalls another mathematical term in Rinehart: the title of her story The Curve of the Catenary. Both of these geometric terms are used with mathematical accuracy.
Detection. There are some brief episodes of real detection in The Door:
A parallel look at the hard life of a working woman is in the Eliza Connor sections of The Great Mistake (Chapters: end of 25, 26, start of 34).
Florence Gunther is an example of a kind of character that runs through Rinehart and her followers: a mysterious person from the lower classes who tries to contact the upper crust protagonist - but who fails. See this article's section on Mysterious Visitors for more details.
Reporter. Dick Carter, the young reporter, is a pleasing character. He talks elaborately and humorously, indicating a skill with words linked to his profession (Chapters: second half of 7, 8). He has no money, and is a working man. His most detailed portrait is in the section that also deals with Florence Gunther, an even poorer working woman. This section looks at the lives of working people in 1930.
Dick's humorous remark, "Give me the papers and take the child!" (near the start of Chapter 11) sounds as if it is a quotation, or a burlesque or parody of a famous quote. However, an Internet search has failed to turn up any source.
Dick is a poor but hard-working young man, happily in mutual love with a rich young woman. This couple recall the young lovers in The Red Lamp.
Social Secretary. Rich middle-aged Society women in Rinehart often employ social secretaries to help them out with their activities and events. These tend to be young women, genteel, and efficient. See: The Door, The Great Mistake, "Episode of the Wandering Knife".
The Miss Pinkerton books were shorter than the enormous, over-stuffed non-series mystery novels Rinehart turned out in her later years, and this is all to the good.
Feeding as Moral Support. The opening describes the heroine at home, before she goes out on a case. It emphasizes how sane her home is. Some of the feeding imagery recalls The Case of Jennie Brice:
Mystery Plot: Finding a Path. SPOILERS. One of the best mystery plot aspects involves finding a way through the locked-up mansion. This is set forth as a puzzle or problem early on (first part of Chapter 4), solved later (Chapter 16). This is ingenious. It anticipates, as a kind of mystery problem, how the killer finds their way through the house in The Album. However the details of the two books' problems and solutions are quite different.
Mystery Plot: Searches. Twice, the police fail to do a good job searching a crime scene for clues. Instead, they have to depend on amateur sleuths who come in later and help find things. SPOILERS.:
Mystery Plot: Who Done It. There are no good clues to the identity of the killer, that are shared with the reader during the novel. This is a weakness in the book's mystery plot. Instead the killer is identified at the end, in part by a new clue found by the reporters.
Architecture. The architecture of the house is set in forth in detail (early in Chapter 5). Even before this it is described (Chapters 2, 4).
The distinction between the upper class family's quarters, and the service wing, is sharply marked off in the architecture. The service wing contains rooms where the servants work, and on the floor above that, their sleeping quarters. The service wing connects to the family wing through a single locked and bolted door on the second floor, plus a first floor door. The two wings have separate staircases, a fact much emphasized by the novel's events.
The two parts of the house recall the architecture in "The Amazing Adventure of Letitia Carberry". In that, a hospital was connected by a door to the nurses' dormitory.
In both works, the two sections recall the paired houses that run through other Rinehart books.
Line of Sight. The butler Hugo is able to watch the mansion's side door to the service wing, from the rear window in the parlor (Chapter 6). This is an example of a "line of sight" in Rinehart: what can be seen (or not seen) from where.
The Vertical Dimension. All three floors of the mansion play a role in the story. So does a ladder reaching up to the second floor roof. Such "vertical dimension" often appears in Rinehart.
Economic Security. Miss Pinkerton more than once talks about newfound money providing "security" for three of the characters in their old age. Their fate would otherwise be dire. This recalls that Social Security (1935) would soon be passed, providing for most senior Americans security for the first time in history.
The Opening: Structure. The first chapter forms a sort of unofficial Prologue to the rest of the book. It has many features that mark it off from the rest of the novel:
Van Dine school. Miss Pinkerton shows signs of mild influence from S.S. Van Dine, who was immensely popular and influential in that era.
Comedy and Color. There is a slapstick set-piece, involving a can of pant (Chapter 9). Slapstick will return in Rinehart's The Album. The can of paint incident has some of the few examples of color imagery in Miss Pinkerton.
The reporters (Chapter 18) also involve comedy and slapstick. And they are wearing paint-covered overalls, linking them to the paint-can imagery.
The heroine's spilled face powder at first looks like more comedy (Chapter 18). But soon it turns into a possible clue (Chapter 19).
Tuxedos. Despite the grim Depression poverty in Miss Pinkerton, two of the men are wearing tuxedos (called "dinner jackets" in the novel). One is the powerful man carrying the ladder (Chapter 8). The other is the lawyer. The tuxedos convey both upper class status, and personal virility.
Ladders are associated both with this powerful man (Chapter 8) and later with the two young reporters working undercover (Chapter 18). In both cases the ladders serve as phallic symbols.
Secretary. Florence Gunther in The Door was a sympathetic, realistic portrait of a working woman, one who was paid little for all her hard efforts. She was a legal stenographer, and had a grim, poverty-stricken life.
The lawyer's secretary Florence Lenz in Miss Pinkerton has a similar name: Florence as a first name, a Germanic last name. But otherwise she has little in common with Florence Gunther. Florence Lenz is a cheap gold-digger, who is out to get what she can from her unmarried lawyer boss (Chapter 9). I find this a less interesting character and portrait. It disguises how difficult work was during the Depression.
I could have used more sympathy for the servants too. They are overworked and probably not paid much. But they are mainly treated as suspicious and unpleasant.
Chauffeur. The chauffeur Mac is only briefly seen (Chapter 9). He is depicted as physically strong and active: perhaps part of the "virile chauffeurs" tradition in mystery fiction. Please see my discussion of Chauffeurs. A chauffeur will have a bigger role in The Album.
Moral Issues. The clean cut hero works for a living: a key to his office is on his key ring (Chapter 14). By contrast, the wastrel victim can't hold a job, and prefers "loafing" (Chapter 1). Such a portrait of character affecting jobs might make some sense in an era of full employment. But it is out of touch during the Depression. In the Depression, lots of hard-working Americans found themselves unemployed, through no fault of their own.
SPOILERS. Everyone suspects the heroine has been having pre-marital sex with the victim. Actually, it turns out late in the novel that she had been secretly married to him. This sounds like a ploy to evade the censor. I think readers were intended to see these events as being actually about pre-marital sex. And the marriage license as simply a gimmick. A similar "marriage license to evade the censors" approach will later be found in "Episode of the Wandering Knife".
Publication Dates. Miss Pinkerton was reportedly serialized in the Saturday Evening Post from January 2, 1932 to February 13, 1932. It was then published in book form. The book was reviewed in the New York Times on February 14, 1932.
The first film version of Miss Pinkerton was released on July 30, 1932. I briefly discuss this OK film in the article on its director Lloyd Bacon. The film is set in New York City - the Inspector's badge says so - while the book is in an unnamed city that rather resembles PIttsburgh. In film Miss Pinkerton and the Inspector are meeting for the first time, while in the book they have a long term professional relationship.
The city in the radio car tales is unnamed, but one suspects it is Rinehart's home base of Pittsburgh:
That Is All. "That Is All" is a crime story; but it has no elements of mystery, and it does not much resemble most of Rinehart's mystery fiction. Instead, its raucous nocturnal adventures recall the comic chase scenes of some Tish stories, although it has serious elements as well.
The young man's blue-and-red car recalls the hero's red-and-yellow bath-robe in The Man in Lower Ten (Chapter 2). Both are flamboyant color schemes linked to young men.
Code 31. By contrast, the grimmer toned "Code 31" has a murder mystery embedded in it. It also reflects Rinehart's feminist themes. Rinehart's detective keeps giving different interpretations to mysterious events here. First he will suggest that they are caused by one explanation. Then a clue he discovers will contradict this. He will then come up with a deeper, better explanation consistent with his new observation. But soon he will find another clue and come up with another explanation, starting the cycle over again. Each time, he gets closer and closer to the truth. Eventually he gets to the final answer. Rinehart's writing here is very economical. Each explanation takes up just a few sentences, maybe even a single sentence. The detective can come up with numerous explanations in just a single page. The progression of ideas from one interpretation to the next is completely logical, solidly based on clues and deduction. The explanations are quite rich and vivid. They almost seem like alternate realities, in a science fiction story.
Before the main mystery gets underway in "Code 31", there is a subplot mystery about the identity and goals of the man hanging out mysteriously by the service station. This is presented as a brief but complete mystery, with a physical object clue that offers alternate explanations. This subplot comes to an immediate solution.
"Code 31" shows the infrastructure that is still open, after the rest of a city shuts down at night: a service station, a drug store, a doctor's.
Rinehart tries to include realistic detail about the police as an institution. SPOILERS:
These tales deal with would later be seen as a major feminist issue. Rinehart is wholly sympathetic to the women in the tales, and wholly unsympathetic to the men. She differs a bit from modern-day feminism, in that she depicts the abuse as being caused by specific elements, drug addition or shell shock, whereas modern feminists tend to see abuse as caused by male chauvinism. This is perhaps related to a common idea of the era, that abuse was caused or triggered by alcohol or drunkenness. Still, Rinehart's gripping depiction of what she clearly sees as a significant problem should be of interest to current feminists.
"The Inside Story" is an unusual meld of the detective tale and the domestic drama of married life, Rinehart's chief interest in mainstream fiction at the time.
"The Inside Story" resembles somewhat Rinehart's earlier masterpiece, "The Buckled Bag" (1914). Both take place in a single household with mysterious goings on. Both have a young outsider as detective who is working in the household, but who is not of it: the nurse Miss Pinkerton in "The Buckled Bag", the young policeman in "The Inside Story". Both detectives are richly characterized. Both are working professionals. Both are of modest social status - this is the young policeman's first big break, and he has not really been asked along to do anything but be an extra cop on the case. Both do a lot of unobtrusive slinking around the huge house where the crimes take place. In both stories, the key to solving the crime is to understand the hidden relationships among the household. Solving the case is tantamount to penetrating all the social mysteries of the house. Both are very purely constructed detective stories, where determined sleuthing continually uncovers more and more details of the mystery, in a step by step, logical manner. Rinehart is good at opening surprising new vistas among her characters' lives. One does not suspect her new revelations, although they are consistent with was has been revealed before, and with hints dropped in the story.
"The Inside Story" is full of ideas about class and gender. The young working class policeman finds it much easier to approach the servants in the house, than the young upper class couple who are the chief suspects in the tale. The servants emerge as much more real people in the story. They have far more substance than the nominal hero and heroine of the tale. The servants all come across as rich, real personalities. They are working hard and taking responsibilities for things, while the wealthy couple are frivolous and throwing away their opportunities. There is a correspondence between the young policeman's social status, and his position as the lowest of subordinates on the force, and the status of the servants in the household. In both cases, we are seeing life from the bottom of the social hierarchy, and finding it substantial. Similarly, Rinehart introduces some of her sympathetic older women in the tale, reminding one of Rachel Innes and Tish, although the tone of "The Inside Story" is far less comic. These women too are social outsiders, being female in a male dominated society. They too have Rinehart's admiration. Rinehart finds people of lower social status to have more substance, even to be heroic, as the story eventually points out. There is a three way equivalency built up, between the young working class policeman, the servants and older women, all three being serious minded people of lower class and power in society.
At first it looks the sheriff will be the only detective. But gradually he gets his deputy Joe involved too. Pleasingly, we get to see both doing detective work.
The Squad Car tale "Code 31" included a drug store: a central location for phone communication that era. "The Dog in the Orchard" keeps returning to a rural center of communication: the local Post Office. The postmistress becomes a fount of information. This brings a smart woman into the mix.
Ancestors. The crime plot of "The Dog in the Orchard" recalls the opening of the silent film classic Sunrise (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1927).
Also, as a tale of adultery leading to crime, "The Dog in the Orchard" recalls James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934).
Rear Window. As far back as The Case of Jennie Brice (1912), Rinehart had written a suspenseful tale about a wife who's allegedly gone away, while people get suspicious that something is wrong. "The Dog in the Orchard" (1940) has the same sure-fire premise. This is the "Rear Window" plot, later made famous in that 1942 tale by Cornell Woolrich.
Disappearance. This is another Rinehart mystery about a disappearance.
Water Landscape. The simple landscape where the dog hides includes water, a Rinehart favorite. Its culvert recalls the culvert in The Red Lamp.
"The Splinter" has much in common with the earlier Rinehart tale "The Dog in the Orchard". SPOILERS. Both:
Motive. A motive is found in "The Splinter" that is not in "The Dog in the Orchard". It is somewhat related to the motive in "Episode of the Wandering Knife".
Lab. The hero studies the splinter under a microscope. Later he takes it to a big city police lab. This echoes the crime lab work done by the criminologist hero in The Album.
Coat. The veterinarian hero wears a white lab coat at work. This can be classified as a "specialized coat linked to his job", like the black rubber police coats in "Code 31" and The Album (Chapter 9).
As Jan Cohn points out in her Rinehart biography, in her nonfiction writings such as "Looking For The Magic Word" (1934), Rinehart fervently denounced both Nazism and Communism, and advised her many readers to support American democratic traditions instead. Rinehart was a traditional Republican with little sympathy for Roosevelt's New Deal, but she had much less for Hitler and Stalin. Her strong democratic leanings make her a welcome contrast to many other writers of her era, who rushed to support totalitarian schemes of left or right.
Rinehart's "Mr. Cohen Takes A Walk" might have served as a model for Preston Sturges' film Sullivan's Travels (1941), which has a similar plot.
Ax Murder. The heroine wonders early on why the killer went to all the risk of committing a complex ax murder, while a simple shooting would have been much easier to pull off; this question is never answered. The ax murder does echo the ones in Rinehart's The Afterhouse (1913), and succeeds in being dramatic and emotionally effective.
Scientific Detective. Miss Pinkerton often solves medical mysteries, and is related to the scientific detectives of the Reeve tradition. The man who actually solves the mystery in The Album is a scientific criminologist, complete with crime lab. He works closely with the police, but functions more often as an amateur investigator: he was brought in the case by a friend who was a suspect, he lives undercover at the scene of the crime as a servant, and does much of his sleuthing by snooping around, just like Rinehart's spinsters. He also has a romance with the narrator heroine of the novel.
Additional scientific detection in The Album:
The whole book, in fact, shows signs of influence from the Van Dine school, of which Abbot was a member:
Social Criticism. Rinehart repeatedly criticizes the way of old fashioned, isolated way of living of the five families in the book as abnormal, both socially and psychologically. She explicitly criticizes the fact the none of the women seem to have any life outside their houses. In a striking feminist passage, she compares this to a world in which "women were taking their places" in jobs and public life (Chapter 34).
The Hero. The hero Herbert Dean is introduced in a slapstick comedy scene (Chapter 13). Later the narrator describes some of his adventures as "one of the few light notes" in the heavy gloomy story (end of Chapter 26). The hero is good at his criminology work - but otherwise he is somewhat of a comic figure. He is meant perhaps as an upbeat alternative to the morbid hide-bound life of the Crescent mansions. There are also comic aspects to the detective hero of The Swimming Pool.
SPOILERS. The way the criminologist Herbert Dean moves into the street as a servant, anticipates the detective hero of The Swimming Pool renting a cottage at the crime scene as an alleged early retiree who wants to raise chickens. Both maneuvers are transparent to the heroine and reader, and designed to evoke humor. Both men are independent investigators, but with ties to the police. Both men offer romance to the heroine.
In addition to masquerading as a servant, the hero dresses as an auto mechanic (Chapter 32). He flirts with the heroine during this and his servant masquerade.
Police Spies. An amusing passage talks about the way the police like to send spies undercover in workingmen's roles, to surveil crime scenes (middle of Chapter 25). There is soon another police spy character (end of Chapter 26). This recalls the elaborate use of undercover police in Frederick Irving Anderson. Anderson and Rinehart were both major contributors to The Saturday Evening Post.
"The Inside Story" (1934) will have its young policeman hero wandering around a large house unobserved, basically spying on its occupants. This continues the subject of police surveillance. He is doing this on his own initiative, while the police surveillance in The Album and Anderson is an organized official effort of the police force.
The Servants. The servants on the street anticipate those in "Murder and the South Wind". Both:
Drugs. The Album has two passages describing characters' experiences under mind-altering drugs:
The heroine has a rapid series of flashbacks. In single sentences, these recall seven incidents from the novel. These incidents form an anthology of memorable passages from the book. In some Rinehart works, collections of physical clues serve as anthologies of a book's key images. Here these memories serve as highlights of the book, instead. Four of the seven incidents include lines of dialogue: something not possible to associate with physical clues in the other books.
Both drug treatments are administered by licensed medical authorities. There is no look at illegal drugs in The Album.
There are also none of the surreal or abstract hallucinations sometimes associated with drug trips in novels. See for example Miasma (1929) by Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Dead for a Ducat (1939) (Chapter 15) by Helen Reilly.
Physical Clues. The Album does include a list of physical clues collected by the police (last part of Chapter 27). However, these clues are more routine and less surreal and interesting, than those in several other Rinehart works.
An unusual feature of The Album: it contains two lists of clues, one held by the police, the other by the hero, criminologist Herbert Dean. This echoes the fact that the police and Dean are investigating in parallel, sometimes sharing information, sometimes on their own.
Architecture. Rinehart excels at her maps and floor plans. This is some of the most elaborate architecture in her books since The Circular Staircase. It is set forth, along with some good mystery writing, in Chapters 1 - 7, 13, 15, 18. The explanation of the killing in the finale (Chapters 43, 48-49) is worked out in careful detail along the floor plan, and shows considerable imagination.
Rinehart's architectural ideas show a 3D quality. The floor plans do not show that cliché of Golden Age layouts, the central hall with rooms on either side. Such a design is essentially one dimensional. Admittedly it is well suited to brownstone buildings, and shows up in such New York brownstones as Van Dine's The Kennel Murder Case, and Nero Wolfe's brownstone home. Rinehart instead has a building with both a hall and a perpendicular cross hall, one which uses two Cartesian coordinates to describe it. In addition, she has many floors for her houses; each has three regular floors, a roof, and a cellar. This gives a full 3 dimensions to her tales. Rinehart loves staircases, too, and often sets her works on them, including the murders in The Circular Staircase and The Bat. She shows people looking up or down levels of her buildings outside, through windows or up to the roof, spatially integrating the levels of her buildings. All of this gives a vertical dimension.
Rinehart also gives her buildings elaborate grounds, which will show up again in The Great Mistake.
One reason that Rinehart was able to adapt her fiction so well to the stage was that she was used to imagining with extreme precision the movements of her characters through her floor plans. When it came time to put her mystery fiction on stage in The Bat, she was able to integrate the precise staging required by the theater of her time with the floor plan movements of her characters demanded by the mystery. The two types of movement flow together in beautiful ways.
Lines of Sight. "Lines of sight" are a favorite Rinehart topic. They deal with what can be seen from a viewpoint. In The Album:
Much of it is set instead in three buildings which are NOT mansions. These locales are interesting. And form a good change of pace from the five mansions. They all have a working class feel. All three in fact have ties to the chauffeur Holmes.
The section opens with a look at "Lines of sight" from Holmes' quarters (Chapter 32). Similarly, the novel as a whole started with "Lines of sight" from the heroine's house (Chapter 1).
Society. Helen Wellington anticipates Marian in "The Burned Chair". Both are spoiled young Society wives, obsessed with clothes and parties. Both refuse to do housework, and have a special horror of washing dishes.
Uniforms. Fancy uniforms pop up on occasion in The Album. We learn about a cop's shiny rubber raincoat (Chapter 9). And the fancy uniform of chauffeur Holmes, complete with breeches and puttees (Chapter 32). The squad car story "Code 31" (1932) opens with the police heroes putting on their gleaming rubber uniforms.
There was very little real life glamour in the Depression. Books and comics emphasized police uniforms wherever they could, perhaps as one of the few sources of snappy clothes.
Much is made of how great the hero looks in his Army uniform, at the end of "Episode of the Wandering Knife". Some of this is simply wartime patriotism. But one also thinks that these works see uniforms as attractive.
Both the finale of "Episode of the Wandering Knife" and The Album (first part of Chapter 46) have comedy patches about the heroine immediately acceding to the hero's brief, unromantic proposals of marriage. In "Episode of the Wandering Knife" this might be linked to the hero's uniform.
The pleasant opening (Chapter 1, first half of Chapter 2) first introduces the Sheriff and the narrator-heroine: the two characters who do most of the book's detective work. The opening then sets forth the architecture of the mansion and its grounds. These will play a major role in the novel. Everything dealing with architecture and landscape in The Wall is enjoyable.
The opening establishes the novel's priorities: first the two main detective figures, then the architecture. Only after this (second half of Chapter 2, Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6) do we meet the book's suspects, victims and other characters, and learn about their marital and financial problems. I think these aspects are less interesting in The Wall than the architecture and detection.
The Wall has a strong early section (end of Chapter 6, Chapters 7-16): around one quarter of the book. This section deals with the discovery of the first two crimes, and their initial investigation. This section has "real detection", with steady efforts by the local Sheriff to uncover the truth. The near continuous series of plot revelations about the mysteries, make for good story telling.
This section is admirably based on architecture and landscape, twin enthusiasms of Golden Age mystery fiction:
The scenes at the tourist camp are interesting (second half of Chapter 21, Chapter 22). This section has political implications, being a portrait of poorer, working class Americans. Rinehart had earlier looked at the living quarters of the poor in The Curve of the Catenary (1916), in the Florence Gunther sections of The Door (Chapters: second half of 7, 8, 11), and later in the Eliza Connor sections of The Great Mistake (Chapters: end of 25, 26, start of 34). It also relates to Rinehart's own non-fiction books on travel.
The quote about "The green stillness of the country" (Chapter 21) is from Longfellow's Hyperion (1839).
Aspects of The Wall recall Rinehart's much earlier The Window at the White Cat (1908). SPOILERS:
There is also a great deal of interesting architectural detail in the early chapters, a tradition in both Rinehart and the Golden Age detective novel (Chapters: 1, end of 2, end of 6). The "architectural" aspect extends to landscape architecture, all the many paths and outdoor features of the giant estate in the book.
An early festive description of a party for young people (middle of Chapter 1, first part of Chapter 3) recalls the exuberant 1910's pre-Jazz-Age social life in The Curve of the Catenary.
Mystery Plot. The Great Mistake is full of discoveries of crimes, and their initial investigation. These have inventive detail (Chapters: end of 5, 6, end of 10, 11, 12, end of 14, 22, 23, end of 24, 32). The investigative unearthing of the facts usually moves through a series of stages, each revealing new aspects and facts. This series-of-stages brings storytelling into these sections: one stage follows another, each creating a new episode in the story.
The first crime (end of Chapter 5) gets echoed surrealistically later:
On the negative side, the detection of the mystery-as-a-whole is weak, the story telling sometimes drags after the opening sections, and coincidence gets over employed, although the complicated cat's cradle the novel eventually builds up is part of its storytelling appeal.
Collections of Objects. Please see the section of this article dealing with Collections of Objects. It has much to say about The Great Mistake.
Mysterious Visitor. Aspects of Don Morgan's situation (last part of Chapter 33) recall those Rinehart characters in other books, the Mysterious Visitors. Like the Mysterious Visitors, Don Morgan is trying and failing to make contact with an upper class person who is well-shielded from public contact with folks outside the upper classes. Don Morgan differs in that the reader knows his identity: he is thus no "mysterious".
Suburban Small Town. The action in The Great Mistake takes place near Beverly, a small town that has now become a suburb of a big city. This recalls Rinehart's The Breaking Point (1921-1922), which takes place in Haverly, called "a little suburban town" (Chapter 2). Both Beverly and Haverly seem to be fictitious places.
Both books focus on a heroine from what The Breaking Point explicitly calls the "upper middle-class" (Chapter 3). The views we get of the towns have an upper middle-class point-of-view.
Pittsburgh?. The playhouse is built over a ravine (end of Chapter 2). There is a ravine behind the house in The Door. This suggests similar topographies in the novels' two cities. Perhaps both books are simply laid in fictionalized versions of Pittsburgh and its suburbs, which has ravines in real life. (However, Bar Harbor in The Wall has a ravine, and the road is hilly and near a valley in Westchester County, New York in The Swimming Pool. So maybe Rinehart just liked ravines everywhere, and they are not a reference to Pittsburgh.)
The wealthy family in The Great Mistake owns mills: consistent with the real-life steel mills in Pittsburgh.
Links to The Door. Other aspects of The Great Mistake also recall The Door. SPOILERS:
Links to The Swimming Pool. The Great Mistake anticipates The Swimming Pool:
Ellery Queen. Aspects of The Great Mistake anticipate Calamity Town (1942) by Ellery Queen. Please see this discussion in my article on Ellery Queen.
There are similar names in both novels. More importantly, both take place in a modest sized community, far from New York. The community is presented with realistic detail in both works. Rinehart includes a history of her community (Chapter 1).
Profit-Sharing. Hero Tony talks about how workers at his mills didn't want charity-like "benevolence". Instead, profit-sharing was a success with the workers (Chapter 22). Please see my list of Cooperatives and Worker-owned Businesses in mystery fiction and science fiction.
Lesbians?. The heroine twice describes falling in love with other women (Chapters: 1, start of 2). She also has full romantic relations with men, in other parts of the book.
The heroine's relationships with other women are described on the level of feelings. No sexual component is explicitly described. Still, this sounds like a lesbian experience. See also Maud's remark about Audrey Morgan (first part of Chapter 3), which brings physical beauty into the discussion.
Rinehart's work includes women who are friends with other women, such as Tish and her two best female friends. These friendships too could have lesbian dimensions.
The close friendship between two men is described as "love" in The Swimming Pool (first part of Chapter 16).
Please see my list of Minorities and Civil Rights in Mystery Fiction.
The Mansion. The mansion is known as the Cloisters. This is two years after the museum in New York of the same name opened in 1938. One suspects Rinehart is having a joke: the huge, overdone mansion has the same name and approach as a famed museum!
Both the museum and the mansion in The Great Mistake are built around entire medieval cloisters that were imported from Europe.
The planned fate of the mansion (Chapter 22) and its related-but-slightly-different actual fate (Chapter 40) anticipate ideas about the ultimate use of the mansion in "Episode of the Wandering Knife". The three ideas are different, but have much in common. SPOILERS. All involve public use of the products of wealth. They have the government taking over the buildings and using them for public good and to help people in need and trouble.
Verticality is included in the architecture:
Rinehart did not entirely give up writing mainstream fiction during this period, although she concentrated on mysteries; the impressive experimental mainstream tale "The Temporary Death Of Mrs. Ayres" (1942) dates from this era, as do others in Alibi for Isabel.
The psychiatrist character anticipates Rinehart's final novel The Swimming Pool.
Locale. "The Lipstick" is unusual in Rinehart, in taking place in conventional urban locales. The most important setting is a big city office building. We do not hear about any lavish urban mansions.
Mystery Plot. Cleaning woman Mrs. Thompson is not one of Rinerhart's Mysterious Visitors: the reader knows exactly who she is, right from the start. But Mrs. Thompson resembles the Mysterious Visitors in two ways: she has secret information that's important in the case; and she's a working class woman who because of this information unexpectedly gets involved with the otherwise upper class characters in the story.
BIG SPOILERS. An aspect of the solution recalls a gambit in The Great Mistake (Chapter 32). It also recalls "The Invisible Man" (1911) by G. K. Chesterton.
The heroine's mother is a kind of character that appears with some regularity in contemporary detective fiction: an older woman relative of the heroine, who is zany, and who keeps doing outrageous things that complicate the plot. These relatives are Good Guys and honest - but they are so uninhibited that they constantly cause humorous confusion, problems and bewilderment.
Perhaps the name of the investigating policeman Inspector Welles, is a tribute to Orson Welles.
Recurring Object. The knife keeps returning, showing up in new situations, ways and contexts. This is played for both surrealism and humor.
Such returning objects or elements appear in films directed by Ernst Lubitsch, Max Ophuls and Vincente Minnelli. See the discussion of the movie The Cobweb in my article on Minnelli for details.
Architecture. The two most important indoor locales are the entrance halls of the two houses.
The indoor pool in one entrance hall, perhaps reflects Rinehart's enthusiasm for water.
The mother has open archways between rooms in her mansion, instead of doors. This is because she likes "vistas": being able to see long views within the house (near end of Chapter 5). This recalls the heroine's similar liking for views and lines of sight within her house in The Door.
Social Criticism. Tony King is another man-of-the-people who makes critical, left wing remarks about the upper class set to which the heroine belongs. He also forms a romantic partner for the heroine. Young men with similar roles and politics appear in The Wall and The Yellow Room. Comparisons:
Rinehart, and perhaps Tony King too, draw a distinction between rich people like Leland who inherited their money, and those like the heroine's family who grew wealthy in "trade" (the wholesale grocery business, in this case). Old Money people like Leland are seen as purely bad, while business families like the heroine's are viewed as redeemable. See:
Masculinity. Some of the main clues are objects owned by rich man Larry, that originally served him as phallic symbols:
However in "Episode of the Wandering Knife", these traditional symbols of masculine potency are turned by the actual killer into tools used to commit the crime. And some like the knife and car are used to frame Larry for the murder. Symbols designed to allow rich man Larry to express power instead are used to victimize Larry.
Similarly, the mounted policeman Barnes is riding a horse: traditionally a symbol of official police authority, and also a phallic symbol. But this mounted position is turned against Barnes by the killer (last part of Chapter 15).
Only romantic hero Tony King gets to employ male display in the way it is intended. He uses a camera early in the tale, a phallic symbol. And he gets into a spectacular uniform at the end. Throughout the tale, Tony is simply not targeted in any way by the killer, and is seemingly immune to the killer's attack on masculinity suffered by Larry and Barnes.
But even Tony King gets a phallic symbol damaged: he suffers from a broken tooth. This damage is inflicted not by the killer, but by the heroine.
Isabel's Secret. BIG SPOILERS in this section. Isabel secretly had a child, many years ago. This is the most realistic and most politically significant of all the Big Secrets that run through later Rinehart books. Unwed motherhood was a major issue, something important to millions of readers.
Technically "Episode of the Wandering Knife" does not discuss unwed motherhood: Isabel was briefly, secretly married when she had her child (Chapter 13). This marriage allows "Episode of the Wandering Knife" to evade the censors. But the real subject of "Episode of the Wandering Knife" is in fact unwed motherhood, only thinly disguised by this secret marriage plot gambit. I suspect that this marriage gimmick was not designed to fool anyone. On the contrary, "Episode of the Wandering Knife" is designed so that its readers would all understand that the real subject of the story is unwed motherhood.
Elements of "The Scandal" recall the mainstream novel The Age of Innocence (1920) by Edith Wharton. Both have:
"The Scandal" thus has a political theme: the need to accept so-called "illegitimate" children. It also expresses sympathy with unwed mothers.
A later section also has good storytelling (Chapters 15-17). This opens with that Rinehart specialty, characters running around exploring at night during spooky events. More crimes are discovered and evidence found, in this section too. Its protagonist is the male Army officer Jerry Dane, who serves as the book's main sleuth.
Architecture. The Yellow Room has a Maine setting similar to that of The Wall. Both are set in "summer colonies" where rich people go to enjoy the summer months. Both have a young heroine living in her huge house in the colony. In both, the gardener's toolshed on the estate plays a role in the mystery plot.
We learn about the heroine's house, which is somewhat unusually built around a courtyard. And each part of the mystery puzzle is firmly set in a part of the house and its grounds. Despite this, The Yellow Room seems less "architectural" than several other Rinehart mysteries. Descriptions of architecture seem simple, standard and conventional in architectural content.
Rinehart does get atmosphere, from the way both the heroine's house and other homes are closed up and mainly deserted. This is due to World War II, and the shortages of manpower and supplies it brings.
Unlike The Wall, water landscapes play little part in The Yellow Room.
Private Eye. Jerry Dane hires a private detective Tim Murphy to assist him in investigating the murder. This recalls the way the lawyer-narrator of The Window at the White Cat similarly hires a detective. Professional men like Dane and the lawyer regularly employ detective assistants in Rinehart. By contrast, her amateur women sleuths rarely seem to think of hiring private eyes.
Both private eyes are something of a roughneck. Both are earthier in manner than their refined employers.
There is a good deal of male bonding between sleuth Jerry Dane, his aide Alex, and private eye Tim Murphy. Male bonding is a subject perhaps more often found in male writers. However, Rinehart does it well. It gives her a chance to add humor, to what is otherwise a pretty grim story.
Much earlier, Rinehart's The Curve of the Catenary (1916) had a young just-out-of-college male narrator, many men characters, and much comedy centered on its narrator and his breezy male attitudes. So "inside" looks at the world of young men sometimes occur in Rinehart. (The narrator of The Curve of the Catenary more closely resembles the heroine's brother in The Yellow Room, rather than Jerry Dane: both are spoiled playboy heirs of an upper class family, who treat life as a joke.)
Reporter. Dane's encounter with the likable young reporter Starr also emphasizes humor and friendliness between men (Chapter 17). Both this meeting with Dane, and Starr's earlier talk with the heroine (end of Chapter 5), emphasize how observant Starr is. While Starr is a reporter, he in some ways is a detective figure too. He is one of the many interesting detective characters that run through The Yellow Room.
Starr is male, but one wonders if there is a reference to a famous comic strip about a woman journalist, Dale Messick's Brenda Starr, Reporter, which debuted in 1940.
Undercover. Dane has Tim Murphy go undercover as the gardener at the estate. This recalls the way the young man in The Bat goes to work as an alleged gardener. Rinehart gets comedy in both works out of these young men's ignorance of gardening. Undercover men also appear in The Album, The Swimming Pool, and comic versions appear in the Tish tales "Tish's Spy" and "Hijack and the Game". Two reporters go undercover as painters in Miss Pinkerton.
Wylie. A State Trooper is named Lieutenant Wylie (Chapter 7). One wonders if this is a homage to mystery writer Philip Wylie. Both Rinehart and Wylie were prominent in the "slick" magazines. Philip Wylie's mystery novel Corpses at Indian Stones (1943) seems influenced by Rinehart: see the detailed discussion in the Wylie article.
Lieutenant Wylie is presented as more competent than the local law enforcement officials. State Troopers also got favorable views in another American "slick" magazine mystery writer of this era, Rufus King: see King's Crime of Violence (1937), A Variety of Weapons (1942), The Deadly Dove (1944 - 1945). Please see my list of mystery fiction with State Police.
Heroine: Not a Detective. In many ways, The Yellow Room recalls The Wall. At first, the heroines of the two novels seem similar. Both are proper upper class young women, who have no jobs and who take part in Society. But a key difference eventually emerges. The heroine of The Wall is a detective, albeit an amateur, unpaid, unofficial one. She is always discovering things and trying to solve the mystery. By contrast, the heroine of The Yellow Room only rarely does anything that might be called detective work. This is mainly left to the male detectives in The Yellow Room. And most of the discoveries about the crime in the early chapters are made by the servants, not the heroine.
The heroine of The Yellow Room has her best detective moment, when she reasons out what her discovery in the tool shed means (middle of Chapter 8).
Clues. The heroine finds a bobby pin (Chapter 8). This recalls the heroine's finding a button in The Wall. Both of these are archetypical clue situations: finding a small object that provides a clue to a mysterious person who wore it. In fact, this kind of clue is so typical that it approaches self-parody. Jerry Dane provides a different interpretation of the bobby pin, than does the heroine (Chapter 8).
Jerry Dane surreptitiously observes Nathaniel Ward picking up and concealing a shell (end of Chapter 16). This recalls the hero of The Curve of the Catenary (Chapter 2) seeing Miss Hazeltine pick up a mysterious object in the park, when she doesn't realize he is looking.
List. Sleuth Jerry Dane makes a list about the crime (Chapter 20). Such lists play a key role in detective fiction. Carolyn Wells wrote about the use of lists in her The Technique of the Mystery Story (1913).
This list in The Yellow Room combines two types of information:
Lists of unsolved mysteries are widespread in detective fiction. Outlines of a novel's plot events are rarer, but are sometimes found as well. Please see my list of Outlines Within Mystery Novels.
Each step in Rinehart's list in The Yellow Room describes another key plot event in the book, and thus forms part of an outline of the book's plot. But each step is also written to emphasize unsolved mysteries embedded in that event.
Related outlines in Rinehart:
Police. Like the Squad Car tales and "The Inside Story", "The Man Who Hid His Breakfast" has a policeman hero as its central character: Inspector Tom Brent.
The police characters in "The Man Who Hid His Breakfast" reflect types in some late Rinehart novels:
Aging cop Inspector Tom Brent anticipates the veteren policeman who is the hero's mentor in The Swimming Pool, Inspector Flaherty. Both are married.
The sympathy for the elderly Inspector Brent echoes, with a gender change, the sympathetic portraits of older women heroines that run through Rinehart. All are shown as highly competent, despite what society might think of them.
There is much more emphasis on police characters in late Rinehart, than is sometimes recognized in critical accounts of her work.
Minority. Miguel the Asian cook is portrayed as a 100% Good Guy who is skilled at his job and who tries to protect the heroine when she is in trouble.
The cook doesn't entirely escape cliche, particularly in the comic scene where he gets angry and starts waving a kitchen knife around. (One might note that the French chef in The Great Mistake, who is white, also has comic moments centered on him getting angry.)
I think this portrait as a whole should be seen as an attempt at a positive, sympathetic depiction of a minority character.
Architecture. The two hotels vaguely recall the paired houses and buildings that run through Rinehart.
A hotel was a key locale in The Door.
Rinehart Subjects. One of Rinehart's sympathetic nurse characters is seen briefly.
This is yet another Rinehart tale with eggs: part of the breakfasts of the title. The hero also debates running a chicken farm after his retirement, anticipating the cop and his chickens in The Swimming Pool.
SPOILERS. The toilet tank hiding pace also shows up in "Episode of the Wandering Knife" (Chapter 3) and The Swimming Pool (Chapter 35). Perhaps all of these show Rinehart trying to get some "realism" into her stories, including an object which is traditionally unmentionable in polite fiction.
The Swimming Pool is a huge expansion of a tale Rinehart wrote for This Week magazine, "Case Is Closed!" (1951); one can find it in Stewart Beach's anthology, This Week's Stories of Mystery and Suspense (1957). Many sentences in the short story have been taken over nearly unchanged in the novel. The characters, while basically the same, have new names in the book. While "Case Is Closed!" is set near the real city of White Plains, New York in Westchester County, The Swimming Pool is located near an unnamed city in Westchester County.
A rereading suggests that many of the book's best parts are in its first half (Chapters: start of 1, last part of 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, last part of 10, 14, 15, 16). These sections tend to feature the book's likable heroine Lois Maynard and hero Terrence O'Brien.
The Heroine: A Detective. The heroine of The Swimming Pool is a professional writer. Although an amateur as a sleuth, she is shown regularly doing detective work, and succeeding at it:
The heroine writes mysteries. She is thus an "amateur detective who writes mysteries", like Ellery Queen. She also resembles Mignon G. Eberhart's mystery writer-sleuth Susan Dare.
We learn a little bit about her books (Chapters 5, first part of 16, first part of 25). She has a woman detective: a feminist touch. The sleuth's name is Sara Winters, recalling the name of Rinehart's own series detective Hilda Adams (Miss Pinkerton). All these names are two syllables long, with the accent on the first syllable. The first names Sara and Hilda end in a. The last names Winters and Adams end in s.
Architecture. Rinehart makes sure we understand the architecture and layout of the important locales in The Swimming Pool:
The pool and its creek form one of the water landscapes important in Rinehart.
The novel's opening describes both the creation and destruction of the pool. This makes the pool have a "life cycle".
The pool aside, the architecture in The Swimming Pool is fairly simple.
Some of the architecture has a vertical quality:
Architecture and Storytelling. Detail about the architecture of the pool is slowly dribbled out throughout Chapter 9. This helps maintain reader interest in the chapter - one of the best in the book.
The chapter describing the pool also introduces the novel's central murder mystery (Chapter 9). Similarly, the section describing the cottage and the road also contains the mysteries of the intruder at the cottage and the yellow cab on the road (end of Chapter 6). Mystery and architecture are closely linked in the storytelling of The Swimming Pool.
The swimming pool (and the murder that takes place there) are not present in the original short story "Case Is Closed!" And while the mansion and cottage are in the short story, we learn little about their architecture. So all the architectural information is new in The Swimming Pool.
Male Bonding and Class. Male bonding, present in The Yellow Room, returns in The Swimming Pool. While the bonding was between young men in The Yellow Room, in The Swimming Pool it is between the policeman hero O'Brien and an older man, an officer who mentored him (Chapter 14). This relationship is explicitly referred to as "love" (first part of Chapter 16).
The hero's mentor Inspector Flaherty is not included in "Case Is Closed!". He was created for the novel.
The stranger in The Wall and detective hero Jerry Dane in The Yellow Room are men from upper crust backgrounds who become advocates for ordinary people and critics of the rich. Similarly, the hero O'Brien of The Swimming Pool begins life as a man from a moneyed family who thinks he is better than other people. But his mentor Flaherty starts their relationship by taking him down a peg and driving this idea out of the hero (Chapter 14). This links the political transitions of the earlier Rinehart heroes with the subject of male bonding.
The bonding between the hero and his fellow police officers is also vividly depicted (middle of Chapter 20).
Poverty?. Much is made of the decline of the family fortunes. The once wealthy Maynards are now living in their decayed country mansion. They are down to their last two servants! Their subdued lifestyle is set forth in interesting detail (second half of Chapter 5). This is fun to read about. But it is hard for middle class people like me to feel genuine sympathy. It all reminds one of Phyllis Diller's TV comedy series The Pruitts of Southampton (1966-1967), which burlesqued the same premise.
Similarly, sister Anne is married to an unsuccessful architect. We learn rather sadly about their modest lifestyle (second half of Chapter 12). The book never mentions that many Americans were living this way, or worse. Anne's problems seem mild compared to the hard work done by the mother in Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950), for example.
The Swimming Pool is one of those Rinehart books that take place in their own isolated world. This is mainly a strength, But it also means that we see little of regular American life. There is a brief look at small towns with an inventory of their businesses (start of Chapter 15).
The Swimming Pool contains (male) characters in jobs about whose work we actually learn very little: policeman, psychiatrist, architect, lawyer. SPOILERS. All of these men, whatever their limitations, are ultimately seen fairly positively: at least, they are innocent of the murder. While it is not made explicit, the fact that they all work for their living marks them out as good guys.
Echos. Events starting with the heroine at the pool (Chapter 16) surrealistically echo the discovery of the murder (Chapter 9). Events that surrealistically echo other events are a Rinehart tradition.
The Visitor. The woman who calls at the cottage (start of Chapter 9) has the makings of that Rinehart favorite, the Mysterious Visitor. Like other Mysterious Visitors, she's:
A Disappearance. A character mysteriously disappears (Chapters 29, 30). A mystery ensues: where is she? This mystery is clever. It comes to a sound solution, to which there is a psychological clue (Chapter 30). SPOILERS. The solution involves architecture, in a simple way.
Links to The Red Lamp. The Swimming Pool has a few similarities to The Red Lamp:
The hero of The Album is a criminologist who moves into a house on the heroine's street, to investigate the crimes. Like the cop hero in The Swimming Pool, he gradually turns into the heroine's boyfriend.
Pets. The hero's pet chicken recalls Miss Pinkerton's pet bird.
The heroine used to own dogs, like the heroine of The Great Mistake.
Date. The Swimming Pool was published in 1952. It is clearly set from February 1951 to fall of 1951, with the bulk of the action in Spring 1951. The heroine is narrating the story in 1952, a retrospective look back at "last year".
The first action in the story proper, the scene between the heroine and her sister Anne is set in "February of last year" (start of Chapter 2). Later we learn that the war in the Pacific had been over for five years. World War II ended in August 1945 - and in Spring 1951 this would be five years.
There are signs that some of Mary Roberts Rinehart's late fiction seems to have been published much later than it was written. Her final Miss Pinkerton novella, "The Secret", has a World War II setting, although it first appeared in her book Episode of the Wandering Knife (1950). One wonders if she wrote this tale during the war (1942-1945) or shortly after, failed to get it published in magazines, and finally included it in her collection. We know Rinehart was having trouble getting her writing to appear in the Saturday Evening Post and other periodical markets for her work. By contrast, her publishing house was run by her sons, and originally funded with her own money, so Rinehart presumably had carte blanche to publish her work with them.
Murder and the South Wind. "The Burned Chair" has affinities with Rinehart's 1945 tale, "Murder and the South Wind":
The Red Lamp. Aspects recall Rinehart's The Red Lamp. In both:
Medical Mystery. Rinehart's late novellas have a great deal of medical detail in them, carrying on the tradition of her early stories, and reminding one that Rinehart is part of the American school of "scientific" detection, like Arthur B. Reeve, MacHarg & Balmer, Samuel Hopkins Adams, etc.
Surrealism. Surrealism had been an important Rinehart strategy all her life. Most of her mystery and humorous fiction eventually erupts into the most startling plot twists imaginable. Surrealism is not found just in Rinehart, but in many other American authors of mystery fiction, such as Jacques Futrelle, Burton L. Stevenson, Cleveland S. Moffett, T.S. Stribling, S.S. Van Dine, Ellery Queen, John Dickson Carr, Stuart Palmer, and Craig Rice. It is one of the things that makes their storytelling so interesting. In fact, nearly all of the major American detective writers have a strong surrealist orientation.