The Circular Staircase (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By Mary Roberts Rinehart and Lisa M. Dresner

Mary Robert Rinehart unravels a story of a summerhouse rental gone dreadfully wrong in the popular 1908 thriller The Circular Staircase.  With page-turning suspense, the tart-tongued Rachel Innes narrates the ghostly noises, suspicious deaths, troubling disappearances, mysterious origins, midnight prowlers, and stolen fortunes in this best-selling mystery.   

 

When The Circular Staircase appeared, Rinehart’s humorous, modern take on the gothic was praised as a new style of mystery writing.  Today, it is prominently included in lists of milestones in detective fiction.  Together with Avery Hopwood, Rinehart recast part of the novel’s plot for their smash-hit 1920 Broadway play The Bat, which was immortalized on the silver screen and influenced the genesis of comic-strip hero Batman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411428621

Mary Roberts Rinehart

Often referred to as the American Agatha Christie, Mary Roberts Rinehart was an American journalist and writer who is best known for the murder mystery The Circular Staircase—considered to have started the “Had-I-but-known” school of mystery writing—and the popular Tish mystery series. A prolific writer, Rinehart was originally educated as a nurse, but turned to writing as a source of income after the 1903 stock market crash. Although primarily a fiction writer, Rinehart served as the Saturday Evening Post’s correspondent for from the Belgian front during the First World War, and later published a series of travelogues and an autobiography. Roberts died in New York City in 1958.