Mystery Maven Mary Roberts Rinehart

“In writing I was seeking escape… for remembering frightened me. I turned to romance, to crime to farce, to adventure, anything but reality.”
-From My Story: A New Edition and Seventeen Years

Mary Roberts Rinehart had reasons to be frightened. When she was 18 her grandmother fell down a flight of stairs and broke her neck. A year later, her father died by suicide. By then as a young nursing student, she was so horrified by the disease and death at Pittsburgh’s Homeopathic Hospital she later described it as “all the tragedy of the world under one roof.” In 1903 she and her husband, Dr. Stanley Rinehart, lost their life savings in a stock market crash.

“What could I do to help? I thought once more of writing but I was always so deadly tired,” the mother of three sons wrote in her autobiography, My Story: A New Edition and Seventeen New Years. Even so, she began writing “fast and furiously” at a card table, producing 45 short stories and earning $1,842.50 that first year (the equivalent of $58,000 today).

That launched Rinehart’s lifelong career as an author who would produce hundreds of short stories, poems, plays, travelogues, and books and helped transform the crime story into novel form. Her compelling, often melodramatic plots, universal characters, love scenes, and amateur female detectives made her books so popular that she was dubbed the “American Agatha Christie.” Rinehart was also credited with the line “The butler did it,” although that sentence never appeared in her work.

Born on August 12, 1876, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, to Tom and Cornelia Gilleland Roberts, the future author was the oldest of two daughters. The family first lived with her seamstress grandmother, then moved to a nearby row house. The City of Allegheny stood at the convergence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, and although the Roberts house was on high ground during the 1889 Johnstown flood, Mary remembered her salesman father rowing the family through the waters of his Sixth Street office building, according to Women of Mystery.

An avid reader, Mary admitted that she “liked words” and her talent was affirmed when, at 16, she won a Pittsburgh Press short story contest. Despite her mother’s disapproval, 17-year-old Mary attended the Pittsburgh Training School for Nurses, where she met Stanley Rinehart, a medical intern. The Pittsburgh Homeopathic Hospital forbade doctors and nurses to socialize, but Mary and Stan ignored that. “How young we were, how secret we had to be!” the future author recalled in her diary. After her 1896 graduation from nursing school, she and Stan wed. A year later, she delivered her first son.

Even after selling her first short stories, Rinehart doubted herself: “I had no confidence in my ability…no desire whatever to write a book. A book was for real writers.” That changed after Bob Davis, editor of Munsey’s Magazine, which had published her story “The Man in Lower Ten,” suggested she write a book. Rinehart then showed him the unpublished manuscript of a mystery called The Circular Staircase. After its 1908 publication, the book was said to have sold 1.25 million copies. The plot centered on a spinster who rented a secluded country house for herself, her niece, and nephew only to have them trapped in a web of sinister intrigues. In Staircase, as well as in many subsequent mysteries, Rinehart’s protagonist hid information from the police to prolong the plot, in what would later be called the “had I but known” school of mystery writing.

In 1909, The Saturday Evening Post serialized her short story “The Borrowed House” and later her humorous “Adventures of Letitia Carberry” stories. By 1911 Rinehart had also published five books, including The Man in Lower Ten and The Window at the White Cat, and two plays. To explain her prolific output, Rinehart wrote she could “think faster than she could write, devise plots and put them on paper with amazing speed,” according to Women of Mystery. Even so, she claimed she “never let my work interfere with the family life.” Having achieved commercial success, she and Stan moved to Sewickley, an affluent Pittsburgh suburb, where the luxury-loving writer purchased a twenty-room mansion. Despite bouts of poor health, she, her husband, and their three sons traveled abroad. Memories of those trips later served as the setting for some of her stories.

With the 1914 outbreak of war, Rinehart decided to serve as a war correspondent and consequently asked Post editor George Horace Lorimer to send her abroad. When Stan objected, she dropped the idea. But that Christmas, learning another woman was writing for the magazine from Europe, she had a “grave conference with my husband” and won his consent. In a telegram to Lorimer, she claimed she wanted to go to London to attend the opening of her play Seven Days. Given her popularity with Post readers, the editor agreed to fund the trip, including a fur coat, and provided letters of introduction. Both he and Stan assumed that since reporters were not allowed into the war zone, she would remain safely in England.

Rinehart had other plans. During a lunch with Lord Northcliffe, publisher of The London Times, she agreed to interview the exiled king and queen of Belgium and write about the war zone hospitals if he recommended her to the commander of the Belgian army. Admiring her pluck Northcliffe agreed, inspiring her to scrawl in her diary “I am to go to the firing line.” From Calais she traveled onto Dunkirk, then to De Panne, Belgium, and stayed at the Red Cross’s Hospital L’Océan.

She then joined a group of male journalists who planned to travel to “No Man’s Land,” that thousand-foot-long barrier that separated warring Belgian and German soldiers who dwelled in mud-soaked trenches. Rinehart later interviewed the Belgian monarchs and returned to London. After writing about her interviews with Winston Churchill and Queen Mary, she briefly returned to the Front, but being ill and homesick, sailed home to America.

From April through July 1915 Rinehart’s war articles appeared in the Post and were reprinted in Northcliffe’s Times. Despite their broad appeal, she complained about the heavy editing done to obtain official approval and comply with the Post’s commitment to American neutrality. Rinehart’s reportage made her internationally known, but after returning home, she sank into a depression exacerbated by the death of her Uncle John that summer.

In April 1917, the Post asked her to write a story urging American support to join the war. Before long the “The Altar of Freedom,” a story urging mothers to support their sons going to battle, appeared in the magazine. Hoping to return to the war zones, Rinehart applied to the American Red Cross for credentials as a nurse and State Department for a visa, but it wasn’t until November 1917 that the government finally granted her permission. Ironically, the day after she arrived in Paris, peace was declared.

Rinehart then co-authored a play with Avery Hopwood called The Bat, based upon her earlier work, The Circular Staircase. The Bat opened as a smash hit on Broadway in 1920, was revived in 1937 with profits at an estimated $9 million.

After the war she and Stan moved to Washington, D.C. There Rinehart reported on the International Disarmament Council while Stan worked for the Veterans Administration. One day as the couple rode horses through a park, his horse bolted, causing him to fall to the ground with a concussion and a broken leg. On the way to the hospital the literary-minded Rinehart later admitted in her autobiography, “Death had once more reached out but had somehow missed us.”

After his recovery, she and Stan bought a yacht and enlarged their Washington home. Despite her emphatic stories about the poor and unfortunate, Rinehart considered the stock market crash of 1929 a “temporary setback.” In a July 1931 Post story “A Woman Goes to Market,” she assured readers that the situation of the unemployed was “tragic but not fatal,” critiqued the American public for succumbing to “mass psychology,” and urged them to spend more money and to complain less. Predictably, complaints poured into the Post.

With the deepening of the Depression, many of Rinehart’s investments lost money, and on October 28, 1932, Stan, who had heart disease, died. As his health failed, the author recalled “He worried about me, that I was far from the rest he had wanted so long for me to take.” A year later Rinehart had a heart attack. In 1938 after her recovery and a trip to Soviet Russia she wrote The Wall.  She later suffered a second heart attack. In the early 1940s her books, The Great Mistake, The Haunted Lady, and The Episode of the Wandering Knife, were published by two of her sons, who had founded the Farrar and Rinehart publishing company in 1929.

When World War II began Rinehart decided to return to England to report on the German bombardment of London. Alarmed by their already ailing 63-year-old mother’s plans, her sons prevented her from leaving. To compensate, she wrote inspirational pieces for government agencies and volunteered for the Writers’ War Board and the Authors’ Division of the American Red Cross. In 1942 her favorite Post editor, Adelaide Neall, retired. In 1945 the magazine serialized The Yellow Room, but after that, the editors accepted only three of her short stories and the novella The Frightened Wife.

Rinehart’s last years were marked by two events eerily like the melodramatic ones in her stories. The first was a knife attack by her long-devoted chef, Reyes, who wanted to become her butler. The second was a massive 1947 forest fire in Bar Harbor, Maine. “The fire left me four chimneys standing stark above the rubble that was once my home,” she sorrowfully wrote about the loss of her summer residence, Far View.

Despite those events, her waning popularity, and declining health, Rinehart revised her autobiography for a third time and in 1954 was awarded an Edgar by the Mystery Writers of America. By then several of her stories were also being adapted for television. Among them was Claudette Colbert’s s portrayal of Rinehart in “Novel Appeal,” which dramatized the writing of her book, The After House.

In early 1958 Rinehart had a third heart attack and died on September 22. At the time of her death, her books had sold more than 10 million copies.