The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart

I highly recommend it for those of you inclined to this genre. It is a terrific book with which to cuddle into your favorite chair and spend an afternoon reading. And of course she, her niece & her nephew are affected by all of the goings on and are in the midst of the solving of the mysteries.I do enjoy a cosy mystery and I loved this one.

Those whom the mysteries effect and those who are causing are in great part affiliated with the home owner of the house she has taken. She has rented the manse for the season whilst her home is being remodeled & updated. There is the theft of all the local Bank's securities, a couple of good & ghoulish murders to be reconciled, a kidnapping, a mysterious disappearance, a mansion that tends to be broken into nightly upsetting the entire household, among other little mysteries.Our protagonist & heroine is the spinster auntie of a young man & his sister. Quite a remarkable read, this little book has several different, but still associated, mysteries going on at once.

The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart (4*)It has been many years since my last Rinehart read and in reading The Circular Staircase, I was reminded anew how well respected and beloved Mary Roberts Rinehart was & perhaps still is in this style of the genre. Credited with inventing the phrase “The butler did it,” Rinehart is often called an American Agatha Christie, even though she began writing much earlier than Christie, and was much more popular during her heyday. Her first two novels, The Circular Staircase (1908) and The Man in Lower Ten (1909), established her as a bright young talent, and it wasn’t long before she was one of the nation’s most popular mystery novelists.Īmong her dozens of novels are The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry (1911), which began a six-book series, and The Bat (originally published in 1920 as a play), which was among the inspirations for Bob Kane’s Batman. She wrote fiction in her spare time until a stock market crash sent her and her young husband into debt, forcing her to lean on her writing to pay the bills. Born in Pittsburgh to a clerk at a sewing machine agency, Rinehart trained as a nurse and married a doctor after her graduation from nursing school.

Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958) was one of the United States’s most popular early mystery authors.