Last year, I wrote about my long-standing love affair with Agatha Christie: how my mom introduced me to her work early, how I tore through her novels as quickly as I could, how I was obsessed with the idea that a woman could be a writer famous enough to have her weekend disappearance extensively covered across the Atlantic Ocean. I was a child during the Harry Potter mayhem. I had seen the way the papers covered J.K. Rowling —who was, granted, doing a miraculous thing and getting a whole generation obsessed with fiction —as if she was the first woman to ever spawn that kind of fervor.
Even last year, when I wrote about Christie, I provided a caveat that I had to write about a Brit when usually this newsletter focuses on American literature because she was exceptional, rare. I was wrong. While Agatha Christie is one of the most lauded mystery writers of all time, America had our own. We’ve just forgotten her
In 1930s, when newspapers wanted to reference that women were highly paid writers they pulled out two names: Agatha Christie and Mary Roberts Rinehart.
Roberts Rinehart grew up near Pittsburgh. She didn’t set out to be a writer. She trained instead as a nurse, scandalously married a doctor she worked with, got married and had three sons. She was all set up to have a normal, boring, upper middle-class life. They were rich enough to own a house and dump some money into the stock market and they were rich enough to lose it all when the stock market crashed in 1903.
“That night,” she wrote in her autobiography, “we started home again. All we had in the market was gone and in addition we were in debt. We owed twelve thousand dollars. It was more than our annual income. We might as well have owed twelve million.”
Now things were not so easy. Robert Rinehart, who had graduated from public high school at 16, decided she would write. And so she wrote a short story about an amnesia case her husband had seen and was paid two cents a word for it (about 60 cents a word today, which is more than basically anyone pays for fiction).
The first book she wrote was called The Circular Staircase and it was serialized in a magazine called All-Story for five issues and after published as a book in 1908. It is estimated that the book sold 1.25 million copies. After that she became a machine. In her first year of work, she sold 45 stories and novellas. She earned $1,842.50 (a little over 50k in today’s dollars) She churned out 5 bestselling books and two plays between 1907 and 1911. She wrote for the Saturday Evening Post.
This is where it gets interesting though. She was a well known writer when the war broke out, and she still had two fairly young children. But when the Saturday Evening Post asked her if she wanted to be one of the few women war correspondents, Roberts Rinehart said yes. The United States wasn’t in the war yet but she found her way into Belgium trenches and medical tents. “I was not I think, greatly popular,” she wrote, “it annoyed [the male war correspondents] that I was there for an indefinite stay and I did not blame them.” (Read this earlier newsletter by Hannah Grouch-Begley about what our stories about women in world war I get wrong.)
She intended to stay reporting on the war until it ended, but left because somehow her rising stardom coupled with the fact that she was a nice white rich American lady got her into Buckingham Palace.
Mary Roberts Rinehart was the first interviewer of a British royal family member ever. She met with Queen Mary, produced absolutely no news, snagged an anecdote about slippers, and became instantly, an overnight celebrity. When she returned to America, she was famous.
She wrote almost 40 novels over her long career and hundreds of short stories, poems, and articles. She made two canonical contributions to the American literary world: her introduction of a kind of mystery writing later derided as “had I but known” novels, in which the narrator observes many clues that could stop the impending drama but is too naive to see them; And she is also to blame for the “the Butler did it” trope, which comes from her novel The Door. Mary Roberts Rinehart was on the national New York Times bestsellers list for almost 40 years straight. She was a staple of the American bookshelf.
In the 1990s, there was a brief resurgence of interest in Roberts Rinehart. In 1994, Charlotte MacLeod published a biography of Roberts Rinehart that led to some coverage I could find mainly in papers near where Roberts Rinehart lived in Pittsburgh. In almost all of the marketing materials for MacLeod’s book Had She But Known, Roberts Rinehart is compared to Christie. The only nomination the book received was for the Agatha Award for Best Non-Fiction. But for the most part, she’s gone.
So how did we forget her? How did she slip so quietly out of the minds of the American people?
Despite the obvious that we often refuse to canonize women and especially writers who write for popular audiences, there are also a couple of less obvious reasons that Roberts Rinehart may have been forgotten. The first is that her work does not hold up as well as Christie’s does. Roberts Rinehart writes about black americans and Irish americans and Asian americans with cheap stereotypes that we as a country like to pretend we never endorsed in the first place.
She also, at risk of sounding like a publicist, diluted her brand. Roberts Rinehart did whatever she wanted. She was a war correspondent, a travel writer, a poet, an op-ed writer, and a novelist. She wrote not only with volume, but also with versatility, and while that’s part of what allowed her the great fame she experienced, it also makes it harder to remember her for one thing.
The one thing that really stuck out to me in reading dozens of interviews from the 1930s and 40s, though, is the way Roberts Rinehart demeaned her own work. “I did not want a career,” she told a reporter in 1950, “The word has never been used in the family and never will be. I ‘work’ when and where I can but there is no real career and never has been.” She consistently made a habit of projecting the values of her culture onto her own life whether or not they were blatantly false. She says that she never (not once!!) kept working when one of her children shouted “Mother.” She said she never let her work interfere with her family life. In her biography of Roberts Rinehart written in 1980, Jan Cohn writes that the myth, “built up over a quarter century of interviews and essays and expressed most fully in [Roberts Rinehart’s autobiography] is of crucial importance in understanding Mary Roberts Rinehart. Only within the protective structure of that myth, only as a wife and mother whose writing was undertaken for the good of the family, could Mary defy the Victorian culture into which she had been born.”
The myth of her career as acceptable to the general public is what made her famous. Mothers sent their sons to war because she wrote a convincing op-ed in the Saturday Evening Post which she later said she regretted. She became the voice and face of a kind of acceptable success for a woman to have. But it may be the reason she slipped so easily from the minds and history books of American literature.
Roberts Rinehart died in 1958. She had spent all of her money on things she wanted. Her papers are housed at the University of Pittsburgh.
Many of Robert Rinehart’s early novels are available to read on Project Gutenberg for free!
On Friday, I’ll be sending a Q&A with an author who was an absolute joy to chat with and whose book is one of the biggest of this spring!
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