The Confession (1917/1921), by Mary Roberts Rinehart

This 1917 Mary Roberts Rinehart novella is one of her earlier criminous works, following the better known novels (all originally serialized) The Man in Lower Ten (1906/1909), The Circular Staircase (1907-08/1908), The Window at the White Cat (1908/1910), The Case of Jennie Brice (1912-13/1913) and The After House (1913/1913) and the Nurse Hilda Adams novellas The Buckled Bag and Locked Doors (both 1914).  In 1921 it was published in book form with another novella, Sight Unseen (1916) as part of the series The Works of Mary Roberts Rinehart.

The Confession is a Rinehart work I had not heard of until fairly recently, but now having read it I find it one of her best tales.  Though Mary Roberts Rinehart was one of the most popular American mystery writers from the first half of the twentieth century (indeed, she was one of the most popular American writers in general), critics, often male, over several decades disparaged her as a "Had I But Known," or what might be termed "feminine anxiety," writer.

"It's nothing human that rings that bell."
An HIBK heroine strikes a classic pose.

The term--HIBK in short form--came into currency in the 1940s after the publication of an Ogden Nash poem, "Don't Guess, Let Me Tell You."

Nash's poem ridiculed the sort of mystery fiction associated most strongly with Mary Roberts Rinehart--most stereotypically that in which a wealthy, inquisitive middle-aged spinster gets involved in the events surrounding a murder mystery, all of which she narrates in a tone of breathless foreboding:

Had I but known on that Monday afternoon that by wearing my blue boa I would set in motion a monstrous train of events that would lead to the horrid butcherings of seven people, three fiendish abductions, the burning utterly to the ground of a stately ancestral home and the theft of my family Bible, I imagine that I would have gasped in horror at the prospect of all this ghastly impending carnage raining down upon my head, immediately run back to bed as fast as my legs could carry me and stuck my head under the covers all day!  But, alas, Bridget was pestering me with a question about the fruit preserves and I didn't give my blue boa anything more than a passing thought....

Mary Roberts Rinehart
1876-1958

Now this is something of an exaggeration (unless the author was simply deliberately engaging in deliberate parody, as I just was), but there was definitely a sort of HIBK style in the day.  Other HIBK writers from the Golden Age include Mignon Eberhart, who came to specialize in frightened ingenues, and Leslie Ford, the great mistress of southern HIBK (also see my discussions of two lesser known HIBK writers, Anita Blackmon and Margaret Armstrong).

However, HIBK will pop up in unexpected places--there are HIBK passages, for example, in such Freeman Wills Crofts novels as Inspector French and the Starvel Tragedy, Sudden Death and Man Overboard!  Yes, the fact is, you can have male HIBK writers as well as female ones.  HIBK knows no gender restrictions.

The truth is, HIBK merely is a lineal descendant of the great Gothic novel (one wag once defined a Gothic novel as a story about a woman who buys a house) and the first person narration so often found in HIBK simply is a tried and true suspense-building technique.

To be sure, some male critics sneered at HIBK--as late as 1972 Julian Symons, a late representative of this critical strain, wrote that Rinehart's works "are the first crime stories which have the air of being written specifically for maiden aunts"--but in the last forty years, with the rise of feminist criticism, there has been a pronounced tendency to reevaluate and upgrade Mary Roberts Rinehart and the school of mystery genre fiction that she represents (see most particularly Catherine Ross Nickerson's The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women, 1998).

Julian Symons (1912-1994)
not an HIBK fan

My biggest complaint about Rinehart's work has more to do with what I see as its often excessive length (something I suspect arose out of its lucrative serialization).  However, I have no such complaint about The Confession, a succinct 132 page novella.

I'm no maiden aunt (you should see my five o'clock shadow!), but I enjoyed The Confession a great deal.  Not only is it entertaining and suspenseful, but it's ultimately a rather moving and psychologically penetrating tale--a forerunner, I would say of the sort of psychological crime fiction associated most prominently today, perhaps, with Ruth Rendell.

[T]he house was cheap.  Unbelievably cheap.  I suspected sewerage at once, but it seemed to be in the best possible order....

Of course that incisive, wealthy spinster Agnes Blakiston is right to be suspicious of the terms of her rental.  There is something wrong with the house.  But the rot Miss Agnes finds in the house is not in the wood moldings or floorboards.

Spurred on by the mystery of the telephone that keeps ringing in the night (with no answer coming forth on the line when the receiver is picked up) and the small objects that move overnight, Miss Agnes starts to investigate the history of the house.

She finds some some shocking things....

This is a pretty vague description of the novella so far, I'll admit.  But I do not want to spoil the tale for those of you who have not read it.  It is really quite engrossing.  Additionally, Rinehart provides some interesting and rather subversive commentary on genteel family relationships, patriarchy and religion before the Jazz Age (and the Golden Age of the detective novel). Critics like Julian Symons, who I think tended somewhat unfairly to view women crime writers like Mary Roberts Rinehart as complacent apologists for the conservative social and political status quo, might have adjusted the verdicts they rendered on her had they read her Confession.

Yes, there's a creeping cat too!

Characterization in The Confession is excellent and the psychology is acute. At the heart of the narrative are three spinsters: Agnes Blakiston herself, her "old servant" Maggie and the elderly (about sixty, I think!) Emily Benton, who lets the house. They are all quite convincing. The mistress-servant relationship between Miss Agnes and Maggie is interesting too.  Agnes sometimes is condescending to Maggie, Maggie mutinous, but you can tell the two women have a very close bond.

A few men wander in and out of the mystery, confidently render opinions, and most often are completely wrong in what they pronounce.  Oddly, not one of them is named Julian (a joke!).

The Confession is female-centered, unapologetically domestic...and entirely gripping, I should think, whatever the reader's particular gender may be.  Look it up.  It's even free on the net.

New Years Eve Post 2025 America's Favorite Vintage Mysteries: The Top Selling Mysteries in the United States, 1900-1940

What were the most popular mystery novels in the first forty years of the twentieth century, encompassing both the brief Edwardian era and the between-the-wars period of the Jazz Age and the Depression?  Well, there were eight mystery novels and thrillers which made the annual yearly top ten bestseller lists between 1900 and 1940.  What do you think they were?  Never fear, I won't keep you in suspense!

The eight books are the world of five individuals, three men and two women, Arthur Conan Doyle, E. Phillips Oppenheim, S. S. Van Dine, Mary Roberts Rinehart and Daphne du Maurier.  And here the books:

"Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a 
gigantic hound!" The first top ten yearly mystery 
bestseller of the 20th century.

1902: The Hound of the Baskervilles, Arthur Conan Doyle (No. 7)

1909: The Man in Lower Ten, Mary Roberts Rinehart (No. 4)

1910: The Window at the White Cat, Mary Roberts Rinehart (No. 8)

1920: The Great Impersonation, E. Phillips Oppenheim (No. 8)

1928: The Greene Murder Case, S. S. Van Dine (No. 4)

1929: The Bishop Murder Case, S. S. Van Dine (No. 4)

1930: The Door, Mary Roberts Rinehart (No. 6)

1938: Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier (No. 4)

1939: Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier (No. 3)

How many of these books have you read?  I have actually read them all, though it has been quite a while in some cases.  All of them, I believe, are still in print today, which is more than you can say for a great deal of vintage bestselling fiction.  What distinguished these particular mysteries, we may ask, and made them so popular?  

There were two books by male Britishers from the Victorian/Edwardian eras, Conan Doyle and Oppenheim. Hound of the Baskervilles is one of the most famous mystery novels of all time and was published when Sherlock Holmes fiction was at its popular peak, when people were panting for new Holmes tales.  They got a good one with Hound!

The Oppenheim book, Great Impersonation, is by far his most famous tale, but probably today even a lot of vintage crime fiction fans  have not read it.  It's an espionage story, a tale of a German spy up to no good in England, which I think owes its success to its being topical with the Great War.

This was a time when Germany was not exactly held in high esteem in much of the western world.  E. Phillips Oppenheim was an extremely popular writer on both sides of the Atlantic for much of the 1910-40 period, though he is mostly forgotten today.  

And then we have two Americans, Mary Roberts Rinehart and S. S. Van Dine.  Rinehart's first two top novels come from the Edwardian era, when she was just starting her writing career.  

Rinehart had hit it big in 1908 with The Circular Staircase, the novel which is widely considered to have started the so-called HIBK (Had-I-But-Known) school of feminine suspense, which has proven popular right to this day with books like Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train (both 21st century bestsellers).  

With The Door Rinehart was back in the top ten
with a mystery after two decades.

I think Lower Ten and White Cat, which are rather more backward-looking books, benefitted from the rolling success of Circular Staircase, which did not actually making the yearly top ten bestseller list.  In 1930 Rinehart returned to the foreboding female narrator style with The Door.  It should be noted that Rinehart also made the yearly bestseller lists as well in nine additional years, but with mainstream fiction titles.  She was a tremendously popular author in general.  

Then we have something of an anomaly, S. S. Van Dine, who for about a decade with his novels and the films adapted from them personally incarnated for Americans the "pure" detective novel of ratiocination.  

All of the other books above elevated atmosphere, character and writing to a great extent, even Hound of the Baskervilles, which is a true detective novel also.  They are, in short, novels of considerable suspense, i.e., pageturners.  The Van Dines are rather drier affairs, though Greene and Bishop are his most outre tales (about multiple killers) and represented the peak of his popularity in the United States.

a cover as dry as detection

Finally we have Daphne du Maurier, the youngest writer of this select group, by a full generation or more.  (Conan Doyle was born in 1859, Oppenheim 1866, Rinehart 1876, Van Dine 1888, du Maurier 1907).  Her classic Rebecca, which was so popular that it made the yearly bestseller lists for two years in a row, was a full-scale Gothic novel, rather a return in style to the sensation novels of the Victorian era.  Along with Conan Doyle's Hound, it remains the most widely known of these books today.  Du Maurier would continue to make the yearly bestseller lists into the Swinging Seventies.  

Ture detective fiction, popular as it was, tended not to produce yearly bestsellers.  Even Agatha Christie had only two top ten bestsellers, in 1975 and 1976 at literally the end of her life, with the much-publicized Curtain and Sleeping Murder.  Christie made her fortune in paperbacks sold around the world in drugstores, railway stations and airport stalls.

Now I'm off to dream again of Manderley.  Happy New Year's!  

The Murder Weapon Wouldn't Stay Put: Episode of the Wandering Knife (1950), Mary Roberts Rinehart

Mary Roberts Rinehart's Episode of the Wandering Knife collects two novellas,  the title tale and "The Secret," as well as a long short story, "The Man Who Hid His Breakfast."

"Episode of the Wandering Knife" and "The Man Who Hid His Breakfast" are, I think really first-rate Rinehart tales.  "The Secret" is much weaker, in that "the secret" in the tale is a trite plot device.

Yet even it was a pleasant surprise, in that it was a Nurse Hilda Adams story.  Nurse Hilda Adams was a character introduced by Rinehart all the way back in 1914, in the novella "The Buckled Bag."  I had thought until now that Nurse Adams only ever appeared in two 1914 novellas and two novels, published a decade apart in 1932 and 1942, but I found she also appeared in this additional, final novella, evidently written in the mid-/late-1940s.

The title story offers a gripping and at times grimly amusing situation of multiple murders and a killing knife that wouldn't stay put.  All the Rinehart staples are present: the wealthy family, the old mansion, the secret buried in the past.

Rinehart is associated with wealthy "nosy spinster" narrators because of her most famous novel, The Circular Staircase (1908) (I know she also used this type in The Case of Jennie Brice, 1913, and, as I recollect, The Door, 1930), yet in the novel The Wall, as in "Knife," the narrator, Judy Shephard, is a comparatively young, unmarried woman who finds romance in between murders.

Even though only five years separate The Wall (1938) and "Knife" (serialized in 1943) you get a definite feeling that times have quite changed in the good old U. S. of A.  In "Knife" the heroine's mysterious love interest, Tony King, makes repeated disparaging comments about the wealth of her family, and she herself is embarrassed and defensive about it (especially that barracks of a family mansion).

The feeling we get is that with the war on more sacrifice is expected of the wealthy (and that it will be willingly given).  Judy Shephard also gets to demonstrate some athletic prowess and more outspoken language, including the epithets "hell" and "damn," and she is looking for serious war work (i. e., a job), all of which makes her more of a discernible modern type.

Additionally we learn that the Shephards are comparatively new money.  They come off rather better than the old money family in the tale.

The plot itself is a good one, intricate but clear, and the writing is lively, with the relationship between the narrator and her willful mother especially well-conveyed (and frequently humorous) and the romance between Judy and Tony subtly and charmingly done. At about 40,000 words, "Knife" could have been expanded into a full scale novel, but I like it as is.

the most recent paperback edition is
more garish and more lurid
but less accurate

At about 10,000 words, "The Man Who Hid His Breakfast" is considerably shorter than "Knife," but it's just right for its length as well.

It's an unusual tale, in my experience, in Rinehart's output, in that not only does it have no first person narration, but it has a male protagonist, a police inspector on his last case, (his retirement being imminent), and that there's an emphasis, quite uncommon in the Rinehart canon, on material clues.

The central character, Tom Brent, is a wonderfully-portrayed character, decent and fatherly, despite his tired feet and conflicts with his obnoxious political hack superior and with his wife over plans for retired life (he wants to start a dog kennels, she a chicken farm). Rinehart effectively captures the different focus of this tale in her narration:

He went slowly down the stairs, aware that Joe's eyes were following him with something like pity. For this was his last case before he retired, and it looked like a stinker. A man ought to be able to get out quietly, to end his long service with dignity. But this murder was front-page stuff. The big substantial house, the social standing of the family insured that it would be plastered all over the front pages of the newspapers. Already reporters were crowding the pavement outside.  Soon he would have to call them in and tell them something.  He didn't know what.

For the Rinehart traditionalists, however, rest certain there's young love present too.  Yet it's Inspector Brent's show.  Had the very wealthy Rinehart needed to write a novel of year like many "lesser," improvident and impecunious crime authors, she most definitely could have built a series around this guy.

Mary Roberts Rinehart, police proceduralist: Had we but known!

The Monday Club Murder: "Sight Unseen" (1916/21), by Mary Roberts Rinehart

The body lay in the room overhead.  But what of the spirit?  I shivered as I thought that it might even then be watching me with formless eyes from some dark corner.

--"Sight Unseen," Mary Roberts Rinehart

In "Sight Unseen" by American Crime Queen Mary Roberts Rinehart the Neighborhood Club meets weekly on Monday nights to discuss topics of current interest.  The club is composed of six well-off suburbanites, three men and three women.  These are:

first American edition, 1921

• stolid Horace Johnson, an attorney and the narrator of the tale, and his wife, "known throughout the neighborhood as a perfect housekeeper"
• literary editor Herbert Robinson and his sister Alice, "not a young woman, but clever, alert and very alive"
• Sperry, a heart specialist and "bachelor still in spite of much feminine activity"
• elderly but engaged Mrs. Dane, who, although confined to a wheelchair, is "one of those glowing and kindly souls that have a way of becoming a neighborhood nucleus"

The "fun" begins when the Neighborhood Group, on a Monday evening on November 2, has as its special guest Miss Jeremy, an attractive young woman spiritualist.  A séance is held, at which Miss Jeremy seems to channel a woman who has just committed, or at least been very recently on the scene of, a shocking murder! 

Later that night, Horace learns that one of their neighbors, fast living Arthur Wells, has died, ostensibly by a self-inflicted shooting.  Was is really suicide, however, or murder???

Avon paperback edition, 1946

Could this have been the murder that the medium Miss Jeremy seemed to be experiencing?  Both events took place around the same time, about 9: 30 in the evening.  Horace and his friend Speer, who starts falling for the pretty spiritualist, begin to investigate and come up with some shocking answers.

This is an entertaining murder story, especially original for its time I would think.  Does anyone know of a situation like this in an earlier story?  

I know of mysteries where murders are committed in the same room during seances, but I'm blanking on mediumistic revelations about murders which are taking place elsewhere while the séance is being held.  There's Agatha Christie's The Sittaford Mystery, but that dates from 1931.

Mary Rinehart knows how to spin an engrossing tale and "Sight Unseen" certainly is one.  Nor is it disadvantaged by its shorter length than much of her work--indeed, rather the contrary I think.  (By my count it's just shy of 40,000 words, so it's a long novella.)  

I'm struck again, however, by how Rinehart was more interested in writing stories about crime and character than meticulously clued puzzlers of the Agatha Christie sort.  There's some spiritualistic activity in Christie's detective novel Dumb Witness, which I reviewed recently, and you can bet that when there's a séance in that book there's a good fair play style clue wedged in there!  With Rinehart you don't really get that; it's more a parade of revelations.  And while the mystery is fine and engrossing, there's no shocking twists in culpritude.  

1989 Zebra paperback edition,
which gives "The Confession"
top billing

Indeed what I probably enjoyed more than the murder is the gradual detailing of Horace's life with his wife, that perfect housekeeper as he tells us.  I don't think we ever even learn this imposing matron's first name.  Poor dull Horace comes off as rather a henpecked soul, as it were, and it all makes an interesting portrait of upper middle-class marriage around the time of the Great War.  Just don't hold out great expectations of this linking in with the murder!  

Some of the writing in the novella is actually quite funny.  The blurb on my Avon paperback copy of the story, which has been coupled in published editions with a shorter Rinehart novella, "The Confession" (reviewed by me here) dramatically tells readers, "You Will Tingle and Shudder," but, nah, you won't.  

Truthfully, there aren't any real scares here --"The Confession" actually is rather creepier as I recall--although there is some interesting speculation about spiritualism and the existence of an afterlife.  This being Rinehart, there's a little romance too, though its nothing cloying, as her successors sometimes were with such material.

Originally published in a magazine in 1916, "Sight Unseen" first appeared in book form with "The Confession" in 1921 and has been reprinted in paperback several times since.  Avon's edition, pictured above, appeared in 1946.  Its whimsical cover of a cigarette-smoking skull, cocktail glass and knife bears no relationship whatsoever to the story, but it's a pretty cool visual!

Life and Death at Sunset: The Wall (1938), by Mary Roberts Rinehart

"Maybe we'd better get at it from the start.  It's not a pretty story; but as a matter of human interest and--well, human motives, it's a humdinger."

the excellent Mysterious Press
kindle edition

Our twenty-nine-year-old heroine-narrator, Marcia Lloyd, is quoting local good old boy sheriff Russell Shand (a quite appealingly-presented character, by the way), about the murderous goings-on in the 1938 Mary Roberts Rinehart novel The Wall.

In 1937, Rinehart bought a house, Fairview, in Bar Harbor, Maine, so I suppose it only makes sense that she set her 1938 murder mystery there, in a suitably fictionalized version (the house burned in 1948, a year after Rinehart was nearly killed there by her deranged cook; see more on Rinehart and Bar Harbor here).

A great part of the appeal of the novel is Rinehart's portrayal of this setting; it will be a rare reader who won't want to make a visit to Maine after reading this book.

I think The Wall is the sort of mystery novel to which the term cozy applies.  Despite unpleasantness and nasty murders, order is restored by the end in classic fashion.

"It is all familiar and friendly again," Marcia Lloyd writes, "this rambling old house, built by my grandfather in the easy money days of the nineties, and called Sunset House, generally corrupted to Sunset."

Of course with the Depression and all, life is somewhat tougher for Marcia and her brother Arthur. Mainly she worries about being able to keep up her retinue of servants--what would they do without her?  I know this sort of thing can sound self-serving, but, I will give Rinehart credit, she presents Marcia's paternalism in a much more sympathetic light than does, say, Theodora DuBois with her insufferable Anne McNeill, who comes off simply as a snob.  I think most readers will like Marcia and want things to work out for her.

1940s mapback edition
with an inaccurate Victorian house

As nice as the island is, there is a serpent that comes slithering into Marcia's midst at Sunset, her brother Arthur's scheming, common hussy of an ex-wife, Juliette Ransom (aptly named, because she is always demanding more money from Arthur).

Juliette soon gets fatally dispatched (with a golf club) and Marcia and the readers are off on a murder-go-round that doesn't come to a stop until there are three more deaths.

Rinehart said that for her crime novels she first wrote out the "buried story" (the true events of the mystery we don't know about until the end), then overlaid it with the surface story. Her narrators offer teasing hints and foreshadowing of things that were to come in a dramatically effective way, in my view.

Some critics mocked this as "had I but known" narrative, but it's simply a tool of suspense. Yes, with some writers it could get silly, but Rinehart was the master at this sort of thing and does it well.

Rinehart received the modern equivalent of over one million dollars for the serialization of The Wall in the Saturday Evening Post, so I can't blame her for taking a leisurely pace.

the frightened lady in nightgown motif
popular in late 60s/early70s "Gothic"
paperbacks--seemingly the setting
has changed to somewhere in Europe!

The novel is long by the standards of the era, about 120,000 words.  Yet there's a richness to the milieu that compensates for any slowness.

Dorothy L. Sayers appreciated this quality, comparing Rinehart's novels to the three-deckers of Victorian sensation writers like Wilkie Collins.  Rinehart isn't that good a writer (few people are) but I can see why Sayers made the comparison.  I'm reminded somewhat of the Barbara Vine novels of Ruth Rendell, though Rinehart is more cozy and genteel.

Considering how popular she once was and that she wrote books that are more like modern-day crime novels, focusing on characters and emotions more than physical clues, it seems odd that Rinehart isn't so well-known today, compared with contemporaries like Sayers and Agatha Christie.

It probably didn't help that Julian Symons was so dismissive of Rinehart in his influential Bloody Murder (published in three editions between 1972 and 1993) and that in Talking about Detective Fiction P. D. James doesn't even mention her (James seems to think Americans of that era wrote only hard-boiled crime fiction).  But for mystery fans who like older fiction Rinehart's criminous works (by my count 16 novels and 6 novellas, as well as short stories, written between 1906 and 1953) are a rich legacy, to be enjoyed at leisure.

More Bodies at Bar Harbor: The Yellow Room (1945), by Mary Roberts Rinehart

"There's somebody dead in the linen closet at Crestview," she said, her voice flat.  "I thought maybe you'd better come up."

In 1937 bestselling American mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958) bought a house, Fairview, in Bar Harbor, Maine, and summered there for the next decade.  The next year she set her next mystery novel, The Wall, in a fictionalized Bar Harbor; and in 1945 she returned to this setting in her penultimate mystery novel, The Yellow Room.

Rinehart, as regular readers of this blog will know, is famous as the head of the HIBK, or Had I But Known, school of mystery fiction, noted for its foreboding first person narration.  Most of Rinehart's mystery novels rely on first person narration, very rarely by a man (The Red Lamp), but usually by a middle-aged spinster (The Circular Staircase, The Door) or eligible but unmarried young woman in her mid- to late-twenties (The Wall, The Swimming Pool). 

The Yellow Room is uncommon in that in it Rinehart eschews first narration for the third person.  To my mind this narration does not play to Rienhart's strength as a mystery writer.  The reader identifies less with the main character and the events seem to lose urgency.

Not the narrator but the initial focal character of The Yellow Room is Carol Spencer, a young woman from a declining genteel family saddled with a neurotic widowed mother, a beautiful, selfish sister who married for money, a brother susceptible to liquor and ladies who has been fighting in the Pacific but has now returned home "to be decorated by the President himself," and the memory of a pilot fiance shot down over the Pacific and presumed dead.

With her faithful housekeeper Maggie (Irish Catholic, naturally), and two skittish temporary maids (help is so hard to find during the war), Carol has returned to Bayside, Maine to open the family's summer home, Crestview.  What they find in the linen closet at Crestview is unsettling indeed: the scorched corpse of a bludgeoned young woman.  Most mysteriously, it appears that just before her death the dead woman spent a night in the yellow room at Crestview.  What was she doing there? And who killed her?

Over many pages--Rinehart's novels were lucratively serialized in women's magazines before appearing in novel form--Rinehart builds up quite a complex mystery which implicates many of the people not only in Carol's own family but in Bayside as well.

Rinehart manages something of a twist ending, but it is also one of those endings that involves a little too much explanation of just why this person did that.  Also, as I mentioned before, I think Rinehart's decision not to employ Carol Spencer as the narrator was a mistake.  

Arguably the main character of the novel is not Carol, but her love interest and the amateur sleuth of the story, Major Jerry Dane, convalescing from a wound received in Italy. In his prewar life an FBI man from a prominent Washington, D. C. family (his father was a senator), Jerry intrudes upon the local investigation with abandon and eventually solves the case, though only after another mysterious death and a couple of (non-fatal) shootings (This Rinehart actually has a disappointingly low body count.) 

Rinehart's focus on Jerry does allow the author to depict detection more directly, but it gives Carol very little to do, since Rinehart will not allow her actually to join in the detection in a meaningful way.  (Clue-finding, like martial combat, is men's work, Rinehart seems to be saying).  

The love element also feels rather perfunctory, since we are denied the chance of really seeing Jerry though Carol's perspective (though I have to give Rinehart credit for not overloading the novel with love as Mignon Eberhart so often does in her crime/romance tales.)

Still the mystery plot in The Yellow Room is interesting (if arguably too convoluted) and the novel, along with Rinehart's 1943 novella Episode of the Wandering Knife, gives readers the author's most interesting look at life in the United States during the Second World War.

There are some interesting thoughts about the war's impact on servicemen and the women waiting at home for them. (Carol, we learn, wants to do war work, but is stymied by caring for her mother, a situation similar to that in Knife.) Though on the whole I rather preferred The Wall, The Yellow Room was certainly worth a stay.

Mary Roberts Rinehart, Golden Age Crime Queen

The real Crime Queen in the decade of the 1930s, in terms of money and sales anyway, was not, I suspect, Agatha Christie (brilliant as she was), but the American writer Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958).  At this time her books, which included mainstream novels as well as mysteries, regularly sold over 100,000 copies per title in the United States (this in a period when people mostly rented mysteries for a few cents a day from libraries).

with her book earnings in the 1930s
Rinehart could buy lots of sheet music
--not to mention grand pianos

Moreover, Rinehart's serialization figures are awesome.  The real price of the serializations of her crime novels The Door (1930), Miss Pinkerton (1932), The Album (1933), The Wall (1938) and The Great Mistake (1940) in The Saturday Evening Post was something close to five million dollars today. Then there were her serializations of the many short stories she wrote.  These were primarily non-criminous, but among the crime shorts "The Lipstick," for example, was purchased by Cosmopolitan for about $70,000 modern USD (compare this with a dozen years later, in 1954, when Rinehart published "The Splinter" in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine for about $3500 modern USD, chump change for this author; this story was published, by the way, in the Fall 1955 issue of EQMM and a list of its contents can be found here).*

*(figures drawn from Jan Cohn's 1980 Rinehart biography, Improbable Fiction)

There was really no one to compare to Rinehart in terms of classical mystery fiction sales during the Golden Age, I think, unless it was S. S. Van Dine, briefly, in the 1920s. Rinehart's fans considered her something more than a "mere" mystery writer (as did Rinehart herself), someone concerned with the emotional impact of crime rather than puzzle mechanics.

Julian Symons once rather patronizingly termed Rinehart's audience as "maiden aunts"; but in fact I think Rinehart's popularity encompassed a much broader demographic. Her mystery fiction not only sold well, but it was well-received by (predominantly male) newspaper book reviewers, despite Ogden Nash famously ridiculing Rinehart's sort of "Had I But Known" mystery fiction [HIBK] in his satiric poem "Don't Guess Let Me Tell You."

I'll be saying more about Rinehart in a few days, when I talk about one of those 1930s mystery novels.

Wives, Mothers and Other Suspicious Characters: The Frightened Wife and Other Murder Stories (1953), by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Frightened Wife and Other Murder Stories (1953) contains two novellas and three short stories, as follows:

• The Frightened Wife Saturday Evening Post 1953 nv
• If Only It Were Yesterday Ladies Home Journal 1950 ss
• The Scandal Saturday Evening Post July 1950 ss
• Murder and the South Wind Good Housekeeping June 1945 ss
• The Burned Chair 1953 nv

This was bestselling author Mary Roberts Rinehart's final published book of fiction, even though she lived on for five more years, until her death from a heart attack at age of 82.  (At least one additional criminous short story by her was published as late as 1955, however.)

Woman 1952
(Marilyn Monroe)

A half-century earlier, Rinehart had contributed a landmark of mystery fiction with the publication of her first novel, The Circular Staircase (1908).  It was published at a time when the Gibson Girl was the idealization of female beauty and "horseless carriages" were just starting to become a thing.  So it's perhaps not surprising that by the Fifties, a decade of atomic bombs and blonde bombshells bedecked in bullet bras, Rinehart was looking to mystery fans a bit, well, staid.

Rinehart had earned a fortune with lucrative serializations of her fiction, criminous and otherwise, in glossy, high-toned popular magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, but in the postwar era she found the new regime at the Post increasingly unwilling to take her work, much to her umbrage.

In 1945, for example, SEP serialized her mystery novel The Yellow Room, but five years later they refused serialization of her excellent novella "Episode of the Wandering Knife," just as seven years later they also refused serialization of  her final published mystery novel, The Swimming Pool, which an outraged Rinehart--who as late in life authors so often do believed herself very much still at the top of the writing game--pronounced "perhaps the best mystery novel I ever wrote."

Woman 1912

As you can see at the top of this piece, SEP accepted both "The Frightened Wife" and "The Scandal," but Rinehart had to place "If Only It Were Yesterday" and "Murder and the South Wind" in lesser publications, Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping.  "The Burned Chair," for its part, appeared for the first time in The Frightened Wife collection, having never seen serial publication.  I think it and Murder and the South Wind are the standouts in this collection, much more so than The Frightened Wife.

"The Frightened Wife"

"Why does any girl marry any man?  Maybe it was the uniform."

"Never know what a woman will do, do you?" he observed.  "Looks like a nice girl, too.....she can probably plead self-defense.  Get off with a dozen years or so."

Reading the title story certainly gives one material with which to speculate concerning Rinehart's declining prestige with the SEP.  It opens in the offices of tax attorney Wade Forsythe II, "ex-lieutenant of Marines in the late if not the last war and now member of the bar." 

Wade hates doing taxes, which makes his career choice odd, but this allowed Rinehart, a wealthy Republican, to shoot off some steam about predatory taxation.  Anyway, into Wade's office, in classic hard-boiled fashion, comes a disheveled dame in trouble.  And has she got a tale of woe!

Her name is Anne Collier, and she's twenty-seven and frightened of her husband, Wilfred Collier, ex-marine and awful bully.  Wade is favorably disposed to her from the start, because he can tell that "[s]habby or not, she was a lady."  However, when he discovers that she's the sister of his old Yale college chum, Bill Blake, and recalls that he shared a single dance with her at the prom, well!

Anne sure knows how to pluck the old heartstrings:

"[Y]ou were going to law school.  You'd played football, of course, and I almost died with excitement when you asked me to dance.  I always thought Bill asked you to....[Bill] was killed in the war.  If only I had him--"  
Unexpectedly she dropped her head on the desk, her shoulders shaking with repressed sobs.

You get the picture.  If this really were  a hard-boiled story, chances are Anne would be a conniving femme fatale, taking in that poor sap Bill with some crocodile tears and an artfully concocted story that is more than slightly cock-and-bull.  But, no, Anne is as she appears: a frightened, helpless wet noodle, a limp dishrag of a "girl."  The question in the story will be not be what Anne can do to help herself, but whether Wade, former football player and marine, can manfully rescue her from whatever dire situation she finds herself in and put an end once and for all to her travails.

As to why she wed such a foul brute as Wilfred Collier, Anne can't really say:

"Why does any girl marry any man?  Maybe it was the uniform.  I don't know.  Bill brought him to see me before they went overseas.  I was working as a secretary then and I suppose I was lonely.  He wrote me all through the war, and--well, that's all.  We were married as soon as he came back."|

After the war, Anne "wanted [Wilfred] to be a man...to get work and settle down."  He finally got a position selling secondhand cars, but he's also become a nasty drunk.  The two have a son together, but Anne, fearful of what her husband might do to the boy, sent him to live with her plucky maiden aunt in Connecticut (a sop, one presumes, to Rinehart's "maiden aunt" readers).

Meanwhile, Anne under a false name since the war's end has been secretly writing a hugely popular radio serial, Monica's Marriage, which has proven highly lucrative to her.  She wants to give it up but she has lots of money her agent as stashed away in a secret account.  Now she has come to Wade to get him to write her a will. 

In case Wilfred kills her, you see, she wants her boy, not her brute of a husband, to get her money.

Already in the first ten pages of this one hundred page novella, Rinehart had done a lot to set me off.  At this point I was like, Anne, girlfriend, you're rich, go get that damn money you earned, go to Connecticut, get your boy, fly to Reno, divorce Wilfred's worthless ass, and live your life! 

Then there's all the old school tie stuff....

Rinehart's own background was not old money (her father, a son of widowed dressmaker, owned, but later lost, a sewing machine sale agency), but she sure liked to write about it.  Probably this was a subject that was paling in interest with many readers after World War Two, but it sure never lost its fascination for Rinehart.  I think she was obsessed with wealthy genteel families who  had lost, or were losing, money and social postion.

So while in The Frightened Wife Rinehart incorporates some modern elements, it remains a highly traditional story with a manful, take charge hero and a helpless, wilting heroine, both of them, but naturally, from Social Register families (or at least Anne's was until the Crash, don't you know).  Hero Wade lives in New York in the old family home with a conveniently unmarried older sister to take care of him, and Rinehart drops casual mentions of butlers and "neat" maids and "the thousand and one people an eligible single man in New York always knew."  I can't help assuming that the word "eligible" in this context means old moneyed.

Anyway, there's more to the tale besides the Wade-Wilfred-Anne triangle, to be sure.  There are, after all, one hundred pages to fill.  So we have the suspicious agent, for example, as well as the suspicious tenants and and superintendent at Anne and Wilfred's apartment house.  Wade resorts to fisticuffs with Wilfred (getting the better of him, cause he's Wade Forsythe II good II be true) and someone tries to kill Anne, with that wheezy old dodge of rigging a thread on the stair banisters for Anne to trip over and break her neck.  Then, when that fails, Wilfred is found fatally shot in their apartment and Anne seriously wounded.  The cops think Anne shot Wilfred then herself and now are threatening her with the electric chair (!).  But, don't worry, Wade's got it tapped.  So should the reader as well.  I never had much doubt about what was really going on in this one.

Where I derived most of my interest was from the questions of whether Wade was going to stop treating Anne like a child and whether Anne would stop acting like one.  But nope, Wade won't tell her someone, presumably her husband, tried to murder her on the stairway, allowing her to think her fall was accidental:

What could he do....Tell her her husband was trying to kill her?  That he had tried it tonight, and would certainly try it again?  He was strongly tempted [to tell her], but she had already been badly shocked....  

Motto of the story: Ladies are better left stumbling in the dark!  The poor dears are delicate.  Those hardened low class tramps, now, you can tell them anything.  Wantons can take it.

Fortunately, I liked the all of the other tales in the collection much better than the title tale, especially the last two.

If Only It Were Yesterday

"It had been an impulse, dark and deadly, like the crash.  Only this was different.  This was death."

This is a good inverted murder story, about Amy, a woman jealous of Jessie, her younger, better-looking half sister.  In a moment of mad impulse, Amy decides to get rid of Jessie by shutting the windows of her bedroom and turning on the gas taps, leaving her to die while she is away at a dinner party at her brother's house.  (Jessie is temporarily bedridden, recuperating from the time when Amy, in another of her mad moments, "accidentally" crashed their car.)

When Amy returns, already regretting her rash action, she finds her would-be victim is not actually dead and that the police are mightily suspicious.  There's a nice twist next, although I saw it coming.

The story also constitutes another expression of a theme which obsessed Rinehart: the sad fate of the unmarried genteel daughter who sacrificed marriage to care for a family member.  Often it's a daughter caring for a mother, but here it's a half-sister who had to become a substitute mother for her sibling.  There's a feminist message of a sort here, I suppose: Women should get the chance to live their own lives, not stay chained forever to a parent or other family member.  Although here "live their own lives" invariably means marrying and starting their own families.  The idea of of a genteel woman having her own career (like Mary Roberts Rinehart) generally seems to be anathema.  (Frightened Wife is an exception, although Anne doesn't really seem to enjoy her work.)

Ultimately, then, the tale feels anachronistic for 1950.  There's also the usual retinue of butler and maids, in a decade when even Agatha Christie was omitting butlers from most of her books and her maids had become, well, simply hopeless.  Just recall what it's like trying to get good servants in Christie's classic A Murder Is Announced, published the same year as Yesterday.  Of course Christie was fourteen years younger than Rinehart, and that age difference shows.

"The Scandal"

"....she was quite a pretty girl, but then he had heard that love children often were."

Here's another story where Rinehart is trying to be "up to date."  Unfortunately for mystery fans, it's only peripherally a crime tale and more an emotional melodrama, reminiscent of Peyton Place and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, about another rich old biddy who two decades ago did her best to ruin her daughter's life. 

In this case it's Caroline Coleman and her daughter Jennie, who fell for the handsome family chauffeur, Chris Burton, and was going to run off with him to get married.  Instead Chris died in a  mysterious garage fire and Jennie left town to give birth to an illegitimate daughter, Edith, after which in deference to Caroline the mother and daughter were ostracized by the groveling townspeople. 

How does young lawyer Steve Wallace, who has fallen for Edith, achieve some measure of justice in this shameful affair?  That is the main question.  (Like Wade in Frightened Wife, by the way, he's another highly eligible bachelor who lives with an older unmarried sister.)

Rinehart attempts to take a 'bold" social stance: illegitimate children should not be ostracized.  At least if her parents were going actually to marry, after all (had one of them not been bumped off), and the chauffeur father had been listed on the Social Register before the Crash (that again).  If this were a Moray Dalton mystery, for example, the chauffeur might have been allowed to be of humble station, but Rinehart, presumably thinking of her own history, won't have that.

"Murder and the South Wind"

"But this is only incidentally a tarpon story.  Actually it is about  a murder."

"Anyway, I guess divorce isn't a cause for murder anymore.  Time was when--"  He let that go.

"Does that girl live with that old woman all the time?" he asked.
"She's her mother.  What else can she do?"

Useppa Island, Florida
unnamed setting of "Murder and the South Wind"

This one takes place at a wealthy Florida tarpon fishing resort, which Rinehart based on eighty- acre Useppa Island, near the city of Fort Myers.  Since 1912 the tiny island had been a vacation destination of such varied notables and celebrities as Teddy Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, western write Zane Grey, boxer Gene Tunney, actresses Hedy Lamar, Gloria Swanson and Shirley Temple, and assorted Vanderbilts, Rothschilds and Rockefellers.  Rinehart was introduced to the island by Hoover, whom local gossip suggested might be romantically interested in the bestselling author.*

*(Like Hoover's presidency, Rinehart's husband had passed away in 1932.)

Sadly, this titillating notion has been scotched by a Rinehart grandson, who has declared: It's hard for me to imagine my grandmother and Hoover generating much steam, particularly Hoover.  Hoover was a friend of mystery writer Carolyn Wells as well, incidentally, so I guess you could say he was a magnet for mystery writing Republican matrons.

tarpon fishing off Useppa Island

Certainly there is steam in the story, or at least heat generated by romantic friction, this being the friction generated among Fanny Raeburn, Pat Wilson and Captain Hugh Gardiner.  Fanny has divorced Hugh and Pat is planning on marrying him, but has Fanny really gotten over the dashing captain?  It becomes a very pertinent question when Hugh is shot dead while tarpon fishing.  The immediate suspect is the only other person on the boat: his guide, Bill Smith, with whom he had quarreled.  However, it's also possible that Hugh was felled by a bullet fired from a plane on a practice flight from nearby Buckingham Army Airfield.  (The story being set during World War Two.)  Or could someone simply have potted Hugh from the beach?

Other characters in the story are the bright narrator, Peggy, and her husband, Tom; Peggy's mother, Mrs. Hull; Fanny's brother Roy, "an authority on shells of all sorts" (this is a genteel mystery so naturally he is); Peter Randolph, an "old friend" of Tom's whom Peggy has never seen or heard of before; Mrs. Wilson, Pat's querulous, invalid mother; and Mary Pearl, Lulie, and Lindy, black servants who cater to the wealthy white season visitors and gossip about them behind their backs.

This is suspenseful, well-told mystery story with excellent local color.  I really felt I was on that island.  The story also feels a bit more up-to-date, like, say, a Mignon Eberhart piece.  (Except the heroine isn't a nudnik.)  Rinehart manages to pack in a lot of event into twenty-five pages.  Bravo.

Useppa Inn where MaryRoberts  Rinehart stayed with her family on her first visit.
They later annually rented a guest cottage.  

"The Burned Chair"

They all rang bells, the Jewetts.  They had been raised that way.  They rang and someone came running.

It seems to me that Rinehart could have expanded this fine novella into a full novel, but such was not to be.  It's another one set in a fictionalized Bar Harbor, Maine where Rinehart had owned a vacation "cottage" and almost been murdered by her Filipino cook.  As the third person narration puts it: "The millionaire colony was slowly dying, of two wars and high taxes.  But its houses remained, huge and burdensome to those who still came to spend the summer in them."

The main character is Jessica Jewett, wife of war veteran Tommy Jewett.  They live in one of the big, antiquated houses, along with Julia, Tommy's haughty elder sister, of late divorced from bank vice president Don Cameron; Henry, his elder brother; and Marian, Henry's beguiling but flippant wife, formerly a "dancer in a nightclub."  (Oh dear!)  In the house next door there resides the Jewett patriarch, Horace, with his live-in nurse, Miss Scott. 

1910 mansion at Bar Harbor

When the story opens, Jessica, responding in the morning to the importuning of the nurse next door, finds old, sickly Horace dead in his big chair in his sitting room, his wheelchair upset, the windows open and the lights off.  Jessica thinks the situation is strange, but the family and the police consider it a natural death from heart failure.  But then why did someone set fire to Horace's chair late at night?  And isn't it queer that Horace's nurse soon manages to fall into the ocean and drown?  Jessica, the daughter of a noted criminologist, is soon investigating matters herself....

I really liked this one.  It's a nice, meaty mystery with both physical and psychological clues.  Jessica Jewett is one of Rinehart's better heroines, at least in my view.  She's more capable than a lot of Eber-Rinehart heroines, having served as a nurse's aide during World War Two and having a sleuth father.  Also, the servant problem being what it is (it's acknowledged in this story), she's not afraid to cook and wash up, even at the risk of getting "dishpan hands."  Mike Grost argues that the story probably was actually composed in the late Forties, with the Korean War references added when it was finally published as part of the Frightened Wife collection in 1953.

A product of the author's twilight, "The Burned Chair" makes a fine farewell from Rinehart to the formal mystery in the novel/novella form.  For the book as a whole Rinehart was awarded a special Edgar by the Mystery Writers of America.  It was the only occasion on which she received this award.

The Missing Queen and Other Mysteries of Genre History: The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction (2010)

The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction is a book of fewer than 200 pages with fourteen essays, including an four-page introduction by editor Catherine Ross Nickerson.  The other essays, all ranging from 8 to 15 pages, that follow Nickerson's introduction are:

Early American Crime Writing 
Poe and the Origins of Detective Fiction
Women Writers before 1960
The Hard-Boiled Novel
American Roman Noir
Teenage Detectives and Teenage Delinquents
American Spy Fiction
The Police Procedural on Literature and on Television
Mafia Stories and the American Gangster
True Crime
Race and American Crime Fiction
Feminist Crime Fiction
Crime in Postmodernist Fiction

There is lots here about hard-boiled, noir, police procedural, gender and race, as one would expected from a modern academic survey of American crime fiction.

In the "American Crime Fiction Chronology" given at the beginning of the book, fifteen works, chosen to reflect the content of the essays, are listed as milestones for the period 1841 to 1939:

1841 Edgar Allan Poe, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"
1866 Metta Fuller Victor, The Dead Letter
1878 Anna Katharine Greene, The Leavenworth Case
1908 Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Circular Staircase
1923 Carroll John Daly, "Three Gun Terry"
1925 Earl Derr Biggers, The House without a Key
1927 S. S. Van Dine, The Benson Murder Case (actually 1926)
1927 Franklin Dixon, The Tower Treasure
1929 Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest
1929 Mignon Eberhart, The Patient in Room 18
1930 Carolyn Keene, The Secret of the Old Clock
1934 James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice
1934 Leslie Ford, The Strangled Witness
1938 Mabel Seeley, The Listening House
1939 Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

A clear pattern can be discerned in this material:

The Distant Founder: Poe
The Women: Victor, Green, Rinehart, Eberhart, Ford, Seeley
The Tough Guys: Daly, Hammett, Cain, Chandler
The Brains: Biggers, Van Dine
The Juveniles: Dixon, Keene

Going strictly by this outline one would conclude that American men after Poe gave little to the detective fiction genre, outside of hard-boiled and juvenile mystery. The only male authors of classical detective fiction listed for the near century between the appearances of "Rue Morgue" and The Big Sleep are the creators of Philo Vance and Charlie Chan.

When we look at the actual text of the essays themselves, even Van Dine and Biggers don't come out so well.

On page 1, Van Dine's rules for writing detective fiction are mentioned, dismissively.

On page 29 he is again dismissed, as an imitator of Agatha Christie.

On page 43 he is called an imitator of Arthur Conan Doyle and used as the usual hard-boiled punching bag for not writing about "reality" (though interestingly he is deemed "the era's most popular writer").

On page 136 it is claimed that his novel The Benson Murder Case is "widely acknowledged as the first American clue-puzzle mystery."

Earl Derr Biggers gets one lone mention, on account of having created an ethnic detective (see "Race and American Crime Fiction").

Rex Stout

Of course at least Van Dine and Biggers are mentioned.  The hugely popular and admired Rex Stout is another such fortunate fellow.

Though he missed out on the list of milestones, Stout nevertheless is mentioned in the text.

On page 47 he is noted for having cleverly merged hard-boiled and classical styles for commercial purposes.

On page 136 he is criticized, along with Van Dine, for having ignored race and gestured "more toward Europe than toward actual American cities," by writing about rich white bankers, stockbrokers and attorneys ("Race and American Crime Fiction").

Jacques Futrelle gets one mention, on page 29, as a "famous but ultimately minor" mystery writer (how the determination was reached that he was "ultimately minor" is not explained).

On the other hand, if you are looking for anything on Melville Davisson Post, Arthur B. Reeve, Erle Stanley Gardner, John Dickson Carr--was he counted as British?--or Ellery Queen, you will search in vain (wait, Gardner is listed as the author of an article).

Meanwhile, Anna Katharine Green gets two pages, Mary Roberts Rinehart three and Mignon Eberhart, Leslie Ford and Mabel Seeley together as a trio another two (even Carolyn Wells gets a line).

The editor of the Companion, the aforementioned Catherine Ross Nickerson, is the author of The Web of Iniquity, an interesting book that is about--you may not be surprised to learn this--Metta Fuller Victor, Anna Katharine Green and Mary Roberts Rinehart.  She also authored the Companion essay "Women Writers before 1960."

In her introduction to the Companion she writes:

It is only fairly recently that the multiple genres of crime writing have been taken up as subjects of academic study; before that, they were entirely in the hands of connoisseurs and collectors, with their endless taxonomies, lists and value judgments.  What Chandler opened up was a new way of looking at crime narratives, or rather looking through them, as lenses on the culture and history of the United States.

All well and good--though Nickerson sure seemed to be making a "value judgment" about Futrelle--and anyone familiar (alas! too few!) with my Masters of the Humdrum Mystery, Clues and Corpses or various blog articles knows that I too am very interested in mining detective fiction for what it may tell us about cultural history.  But it seems to me that the book Nickerson edited too often looks not through American crime fiction, but past it--past it, that is, when the crime fiction does not fit preconceived and circular notions of what American crime fiction is.

According to Nickerson there were two indigenous creative strains in American mystery: the female domestic novel/female Gothic (the English Bronte sisters and Mary Elizabeth Braddon are admitted as influences here, but not Wilkie Collins or Sheridan Le Fanu) and the male hard-boiled/noir.

It seems that what we think of as the "classical" Golden Age detective novel was about as American as spotted dick. Nickerson writes dismissively of Golden Age detective novels with their "puzzles and country houses full of amusing guests," declaring that they were "presided over by Agatha Christie and imitated by Americans like S. S. Van Dine."

just in case you were wondering....

So, if you were an American man writing mysteries with puzzles and upper middle-class class/wealthy milieus, you were part of a British country house mystery tradition and thus not worthy of inclusion in a historical survey of American mystery fiction; but if you were an American woman writing mysteries with puzzles and upper middle-class/wealthy milieus, you were part of the American female domestic novel/female Gothic tradition--even though some of this tradition was British and male--and you make it into the survey.

So the result is Leslie Ford, for example, but no Ellery Queen.  Ellery Queen is the American detective story, Anthony Boucher once wrote--but then I suppose Boucher was just one of those mere connoisseurs and collectors.  What did he know?

Note: This piece is a revision of an article originally written for Steve Lewis' Mystery*File. Looking back at it now, I see that I should have noted that the Companion overlooks Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Craig Rice, Elizabeth Daly, Helen McCloy, Helen Reilly, Cornell Woolrich and most mid-century American women suspense writers as well. I have a feeling that the latter omission won't be happening again in any future edition of the Companion (these women suspense writers are coming soon to the Library of America).

For more of my genre literature encounters with Catherine Ross Nickerson, connoisseurs and collectors, see my Mabel Seeley's Murders in Minnesota, Part One and Part Two.

Also you can use the search box to check out the numerous past posts I have made on Leslie Ford, Mignon Eberhart, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Carolyn Wells, Phoebe Atwood Taylor, Craig Rice, Elizabeth Daly, Helen McCloy, Helen Reilly and, yes, even Ellery Queen.  Check out the posts on Rufus King, Patrick Quentin, Cornell Woolrich, Hugh Austin, George Bellairs and Todd Downing too.  Those guys were no slouches either.