The Circular Staircase (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

By Mary Roberts Rinehart and Lisa M. Dresner

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.

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: Mar 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781411467484

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.

Book preview

THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE

MARY ROBERTS RINEHART

INTRODUCTION BY LISA M. DRESNER

Introduction and Suggested Reading © 2009 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

This 2012 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

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ISBN: 978-1-4114-6748-4

INTRODUCTION

IN MARY ROBERTS RINEHART’S POPULAR 1908 THRILLER THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE, readers will enjoy the story of feisty spinster Rachel Innes, who shepherds her grown niece and nephew through the vicissitudes of young love and through a disastrous summer house rental that peppers the beleaguered family with ghostly noises, suspicious deaths, troubling disappearances, mysterious family histories, midnight prowlers, and stolen fortunes. The Circular Staircase holds an important place in the history of detective fiction: when it appeared, Rinehart’s humorous, modern take on the gothic was praised as a new style of mystery writing, and the novel eventually achieved best-seller status; it is recognized as a milestone in detective fiction and remains Rinehart’s best-known work. 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 in several versions. The 1926 film version and the 1931 film version, The Bat Whispers, both directed by Roland West, even reputedly influenced the genesis of comic-strip hero Batman.¹ For the modern reader, The Circular Staircase combines a visit to the world of a century ago with laughs, chills, romance, and page-turning suspense.

Born on August 12, 1876, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, Mary Roberts Rinehart led an active, exciting life that included stints as a student nurse (during the course of which she met and married her surgeon husband, to whom she bore three sons), a World War I correspondent, a suffragette, and an advocate for Native-American rights in addition to her long and extremely prolific career as an author. An avid out doorswoman, Rinehart camped, hunted, and fished with her family and friends, endured spartan conditions while pursuing her journalistic and personal adventures, and did not scruple to brandish a gun when hunting a suspected ghost. Among her friends and acquaintances, she counted politicians, military men, authors, and the lions of Broadway and Hollywood. According to her lively 1931 autobiography, My Story, Rinehart’s writing career originated in economic necessity, as a teenaged Rinehart submitted stories to a local newspaper contest when her parents faced hard times. Later, when Rinehart was a young mother in her late twenties and she and her husband had fallen into debt as the result of a stock-market panic, she began writing again to help stabilize the family’s finances, turning out poems, short stories, and serialized longer stories for magazines such as Munsey’s and Scribner’s. Rinehart’s big break came with the publication of The Circular Staircase—a revised version of her second serialized long story²—in novel format in 1908, when she was in her early thirties. She soon became a famous best-selling, high-earning author, yet her expenses grew to match—and sometimes outpace—her income, so that even late in her career, she often wrote simply to support a lavish lifestyle. The Circular Staircase was followed by a long string of best-selling works, and Rinehart and her writings remained popular into her last years. When Rinehart died of complications from a heart attack on September 22, 1958, she had authored many dozens of works in a dizzying variety of genres.

Although the prolific Rinehart published pieces in an impressive range of genres—travelogues, thrillers, comic novels, literary novels, romances, plays, short stories, poems, editorials, and political commentaries—she seemed proudest of her journalistic work, noting in her autobiography with her characteristic disarming frankness: . . . I was a good reporter; I was a bad novelist, but I was a good reporter.³ She was also delighted by her broad popular appeal, telling interviewer Harvey Breit: The extent of my audience pleases me. . . . It ranges from Gertrude Stein to stevedores.⁴

While she had had extensive exposure to the seamier aspects of big-city life during her time as a nurse, Rinehart noted in My Story that she deliberately eschewed realist fiction for several reasons, including wanting her children to read her work—a prescient move, as two of her sons eventually became her publishers through the publishing house of Farrar and Rinehart.

One feature of The Circular Staircase that has surprised readers ever since it was first published is its humor—narrator Rachel Innes is delightfully tart-tongued both about herself and about the others in her milieu. Rachel’s self-deprecating wit and down-to-earth narrative style reflect Rinehart’s own unpretentious narrative voice when she writes about herself—Rinehart’s autobiography, for example, includes a picture of her trout fishing in a rather unflattering costume with her own wry caption underneath it: Several layers of clothing do not improve the figure!⁵

Readers may also be struck by the extreme class-consciousness of the thriller’s narrator. Rachel Innes is, as her last name suggests, the ultimate society insider, and she never lets the reader—or anyone else—forget it. Rachel’s talk abounds in references to family traditions, and she responds to a family slight with some choice barbs about the relative class positions of the parties’ forebears. While her niece and nephew, whose fortunes are menaced in the novel, are extremely wealthy in their own right, Rachel constructs herself as their social superior and remarks with asperity that some supposed character flaw of theirs does not come from her side of the family. How we are meant to take Rachel’s snobbery is a vexed question—on the one hand, she pokes fun at the social pretensions of others, and she seems to poke a great deal of fun at herself as well; on the other hand, she seems oblivious to her own snobbery. Are we meant to laugh at Rachel instead of with her in this area?

Despite—or perhaps, because of—the fact that Rachel is generally a likeable narrator, modern readers may be shocked at the regressive casual racism she evinces in reference to Thomas Johnson, the elderly African-American family retainer whose first name and stereotypical initial characterization, as Arnold R. Hoffman aptly notes, suggest the character of Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sentimental anti-slavery narrative Uncle Tom’s Cabin.⁶ Thomas eventually winds up coming off reasonably well in the book, however, as he is presented as a kind, trustworthy, loyal, dignified, impeccably dressed, and popular man. Thomas is, in fact, explicitly compared favorably with a scurrilous wealthy white crime victim, who is so disliked in life that the local minister fakes a cold to avoid having to deliver his eulogy! Another African-American servant, Sam Bohannon, is delineated as brave, trustworthy, and intelligent, though the latter characteristic is presented through a noxious backhanded compliment.

We might consider Rachel’s problematic treatment of Thomas and other African-American servants as partially a class issue in light of her treatment of servants generally. Rachel has a fond yet dismissive relationship with her (presumably white) long-time companion Liddy Allen: She discounts Liddy’s deductions and resolutely ignores Liddy’s fears and paranormal observations. Indeed, Rachel displays a dismissive attitude toward most of the other servants of all races, regarding them all as easily spooked and credulous, regardless of race.

We get a hint of Rinehart’s own sense of race and class in two instances where life imitated art: just as Rachel Innes brings her family to an apparently haunted summer rental in The Circular Staircase, Rinehart and her family had similar eerie encounters twice in the decades after she had written the novel. As she details in My Story, Rinehart’s family twice rented dwellings apparently inhabited by a poltergeist. When she, her family, and her secretary perceived the hauntings—hearing mysterious noises, seeing objects move, spotting suspicious lights—Rinehart took these phenomena considerably more seriously than when they were initially reported by her African-American servants. Moreover, much like her character Rachel Innes, Rinehart herself tried to silence her servants about their observations and initially ascribed these observations to mere superstition.

Rachel Innes’ masculine nickname—she is Aunt Ray to her niece and nephew—also underlines her possession of stereotypi cally masculine detective qualities. Indeed, Rachel demonstrates many strong detection skills: she conducts searches, makes discoveries, formulates theories, and conducts experiments to verify her hypotheses; she not only turns over a dead body in more traditional circumstances, but also boldly accompanies a crew on a late-night grave-robbing expedition; she deduces the existence of, seeks, and finds a secret panel; and she develops several reasonable suspicions that are eventually justified.

Some readers may be tempted to dismiss Rachel Innes’ detection skills because much of the mystery is finally revealed via the work of her professional counterpart, the detective Mr. Jamieson, and through an unsolicited deathbed confession. These displacements of investigative triumph onto a male actor or onto circumstances generally are, however, a classic feature of the gothic novel, a genre to which The Circular Staircase arguably belongs. Gothic novels feature heroines who are almost-detectives—investigating women who search for answers and ask questions that should provide those answers, only to have the answers providentially provided by some unsolicited source—and Rachel Innes fits with the women of this tradition, from Emily St. Aubert in Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udol pho to Valeria Woodville in Wilkie Collins’ The Law and the Lady.⁷ LeRoy Lad Panek similarly sees this displacement of agency as a generic feature, ascribing it to the fact that . . . Rinehart has satirized the old, quasi-gothic sensation novel variety of the mystery and not the Poe-revival detective story. . . .⁸

Rachel and the other women of the household also fit the gothic tradition of the almost-detective in their complex relations with their own physicality. On the one hand, Rachel’s body often fails her at moments of crisis: she is frightened of mice, gets dizzy and lightheaded, finds herself in a paralysis of fright, and frequently makes comments like My hand shook, I was collapsed, I could scarcely step, and . . . [M]y knees wouldn’t hold me. On the other hand, like earlier gothic detectives, Rachel is quite physically bold at times: A self-described [m]iddle-aged spinster who fears heights, she nevertheless explores the roof of her rented mansion in search of a murderer, and when trapped in a dark room with a dastardly villain, she defends herself vigorously, wielding a mean chair. Rachel’s description of herself on the roof in pursuit of her quarry is illustrative of her mettle: . . . I climbed out onto the Sunnyside roof without a second’s hesitation, like a dog on a scent, like my bear-skin progenitor, with his spear and his wild boar, to me now there was the lust of the chase, the frenzy of pursuit, the dust of battle. Here, in Rachel’s comparison of herself to animal, caveman, hunter, and warrior, we see a much bolder, arguably masculine relationship to her body. The other women of the household similarly follow this pattern, displaying the same schizophrenic relationship to their physicality, as they appear by turns frightened and fierce in their investigations.

A major theme of The Circular Staircase is that of modernity, of the transition from the Victorian era of the mid-to-late nineteenth century into the nascent Edwardian era of the early twentieth. Rachel frequently compares the contemporary world unfavorably to the world of her girlhood in all respects, but particularly with respect to modern women and their behavior, making comments like these: Girls in my day did not meekly accept the public’s verdict as to the man they loved, and . . . [L]ike all young girls nowadays, I don’t suppose you wear flannels. This valuation of past over present, particularly regarding women’s behavior, may reflect some of Rinehart’s own anxieties over the potentially conflicting roles of wife/mother and career woman at the dawn of the twentieth century, both for herself and for women of her times generally. While Rinehart claims in My Story and elsewhere always to have privileged domestic duties over work and urges other women to do likewise, Martha Hailey DuBose points out in Women of Mystery that in reality, Rinehart sometimes did the opposite and was [b]y today’s standards . . . a decidedly conflicted feminist.⁹ Although Rinehart acknowledged and adapted to the changes modernity had brought, like her character Rachel Innes, her sympathies clearly lay with the past.

The Circular Staircase appeared to positive reviews: The Arena magazine gushed: "With the possible exception of The House of a Thousand Candles, this is by far the best mystery or detective story of recent years. It is ingenious in plot and skilful [sic] in execution."¹⁰ The New York Times lauded the characterization of Rachel Innes, called the novel the sort of thing people sit up nights to finish, and rejoiced that it was written in [a] delightfully humorous vein. . . .¹¹

Other critical assessments of Rinehart’s work during her lifetime usually tempered any stylistic misgivings with lavish praise: writing in 1953 in Blood in Their Ink, Sutherland Scott lauds Rinehart’s genius in the creation of atmosphere.¹² Howard Haycraft’s take on Rinehart, published during her lifetime in Murder for Pleasure, acknowledges her faults, but praises the Rinehart formula as delightful and forgives her flaws based upon her superlative talent as one of the great story-tellers of the age. . . .¹³

After Ogden Nash mocked her writing style in The Circular Staircase and later works in his poem Don’t Guess, Let Me Tell You,¹⁴ Rinehart became known in jest as the founder of the Had-I-But-Known school of detective fiction, since her distinctive style had sparked many imitators who copied Rinehart’s stylistic quirk of having the narrator detail what forthcoming horrors might have been averted had she but known the consequences of some seemingly innocent act. As Margaret Caldwell Thomas argues persuasively in Women of Mystery, however, this foreshadowing technique is well suited to maintaining readers’ interest in the magazine-serial format in which many of Rinehart’s novels also appeared.¹⁵ In The Art of the Mystery Story, James Sandoe, while blaming the popularization and wording of this device on Rinehart, traces it back in spirit if not in fact to Rinehart’s literary foremother, the eighteenth-century gothic thriller writer Ann Radcliffe, in her Mysteries of Udolpho.¹⁶

Critics number among Rinehart’s other literary progenitors the Victorian sensation novelist Wilkie Collins and the detective-story writers Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Anna Katherine Green.¹⁷ According to DuBose in Women of Mystery, Rinehart’s literary descendants include the best-selling authors Victoria Holt and Mary Higgins Clark. Sandoe adds to those influenced by Rinehart’s formula Margaret Millar, Lenore Glen Offord, Mabel Seeley, Dorothy B. Hughes, and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding; Scott adds Kay Strahan and Dorothy Disney; and in American Mystery and Detective Novels, Larry Landrum adds Paul Auster, Leslie Ford, and Mignon G. Eberhart. ¹⁸

Despite her vast influence on later mystery fiction, Rinehart herself has fallen somewhat out of fashion in recent years. Yet surely the current neglect of Rinehart and her work is undeserved. Just as Rachel Innes appreciates the beauties of the century past, so should we look back to a rediscovered treasure from the century before our own. As she aimed to do, in The Circular Staircase, Rinehart writes amusing escapist fiction that beguiles a weary hour while providing a fascinating window for modern readers into the mores and social tensions of a bygone era.

Lisa M. Dresner is the author of The Female Investigator in Literature, Film, and Popular Culture. She is currently a special assistant professor at Hofstra University.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE - I TAKE A COUNTRY HOUSE

CHAPTER TWO - A LINK CUFF-BUTTON

CHAPTER THREE - MR. JOHN BAILEY APPEARS

CHAPTER FOUR - WHERE IS HALSEY?

CHAPTER FIVE - GERTRUDE’S ENGAGEMENT

CHAPTER SIX - IN THE EAST CORRIDOR

CHAPTER SEVEN - A SPRAINED ANKLE

CHAPTER EIGHT - THE OTHER HALF OF THE LINK

CHAPTER NINE - JUST LIKE A GIRL

CHAPTER TEN - THE TRADERS’ BANK

CHAPTER ELEVEN - HALSEY MAKES A CAPTURE

CHAPTER TWELVE - ONE MYSTERY FOR ANOTHER

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - LOUISE

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - AN EGGNOG AND A TELEGRAM

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - LIDDY GIVES THE ALARM

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - IN THE EARLY MORNING

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - A HINT OF SCANDAL

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - A HOLE IN THE WALL

CHAPTER NINETEEN - CONCERNING THOMAS

CHAPTER TWENTY - DOCTOR WALKER’S WARNING

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - FOURTEEN ELM STREET

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - A LADDER OUT OF PLACE

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - WHILE THE STABLES BURNED

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - FLINDERS

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - A VISIT FROM LOUISE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - HALSEY’S DISAPPEARANCE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - WHO IS NINA CARRINGTON?

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - A TRAMP AND THE TOOTHACHE

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - A SCRAP OF PAPER

CHAPTER THIRTY - WHEN CHURCHYARDS YAWN

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE - BETWEEN TWO FIREPLACES

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO - ANNE WATSON’S STORY

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE - AT THE FOOT OF THE STAIRS

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR - THE ODDS AND ENDS

ENDNOTES

SUGGESTED READING

CHAPTER ONE

I TAKE A COUNTRY HOUSE

THIS IS THE STORY OF HOW A MIDDLE-AGED SPINSTER LOST HER MIND, deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies happy and prosperous. For twenty years I had been perfectly comfortable; for twenty years I had had the window boxes filled in the spring, the carpets lifted, the awnings put up and the furniture covered with brown linen; for as many summers I had said good-by to my friends, and, after watching their perspiring hegira, had settled down to a delicious quiet in town, where the mail comes three times a day, and the water supply does not depend on a tank on the roof.

And then—the madness seized me. When I look back over the months I spent at Sunnyside, I wonder that I survived at all. As it is, I show the wear and tear of my harrowing experiences. I have turned very gray—Liddy reminded me of it, only yesterday, by saying that a little bluing in the rinse-water would make my hair silvery, instead of a yellowish white. I hate to be reminded of unpleasant things and I snapped her off.

No, I said sharply, I’m not going to use bluing at my time of life, or starch, either.

Liddy’s nerves are gone, she said, since that awful summer, but she has enough left, goodness knows! And when she begins to go around with a lump in her throat, all I have to do is to threaten to return to Sunnyside, and she is frightened into a semblance of cheerfulness—from which you may judge that the summer there was anything but a success.

The newspaper accounts have been so garbled and incomplete—one of them mentioned me but once, and then only as the tenant at the time the thing happened—that I feel it my due to tell what I know. Mr. Jamieson, the detective, said himself he could never have done without me, although he gave me little enough credit, in print.

I shall have to go back several years—thirteen, to be exact—to start my story. At that time my brother died, leaving me his two children. Halsey was eleven then, and Gertrude was seven. All the responsibilities of maternity were thrust upon me suddenly; to perfect the profession of motherhood requires precisely as many years as the child has lived, like the man who started to carry the calf and ended by walking along with the bull on his shoulders. However, I did the best I could. When Gertrude got past the hair-ribbon age, and Halsey asked for a scarf-pin and put on long trousers—and a wonderful help that was to the darning—I sent them away to good schools. After that, my responsibility was chiefly postal, with three months every summer in which to replenish their wardrobes, look over their lists of acquaintances, and generally to take my foster-motherhood out of its nine months’ retirement in camphor.

I missed the summers with them when, somewhat later, at boarding school and college, the children spent much of their vacations with friends. Gradually I found that my name signed to a check was even more welcome than when signed to a letter, though I wrote them at stated intervals. But when Halsey had finished his electrical course and Gertrude her boarding school, and both came home to stay, things were suddenly changed. The winter Gertrude came out was nothing but a succession of sitting up late at night to bring her home from things, taking her to the dressmakers between naps the next day, and discouraging ineligible youths with either more money than brains, or more brains than money. Also, I acquired a great many things: to say lingerie for undergarments, frocks and gowns instead of dresses, and that beardless sophomores are not college boys, but college men. Halsey required less personal supervision, and as they both got their mother’s fortune that winter, my responsibility became purely moral. Halsey bought a car, of course, and I learned how to tie over my bonnet a gray baize veil, and, after a time, never to stop to look at the dogs one has run down. People are apt to be so unpleasant about their dogs.

The additions to my education made me a properly equipped maiden aunt, and by spring I was quite tractable. So when Halsey suggested camping in the Adirondacks and Gertrude wanted Bar Harbor, we compromised on a good country house with links near, within motor distance of town and telephone distance of the doctor. That was how we went to Sunnyside.

We went out to inspect the property, and it seemed to deserve its name. Its cheerful appearance gave no indication whatever of anything out of the ordinary. Only one thing seemed unusual to me: the housekeeper, who had been left in charge, had moved