A glimpse of Mary Roberts Rinehart.

On the Periscope Films YouTube channel, there is a newsreel program, "It Seemed Like Yesterday." In it, there are a few seconds of author Mary Roberts Rinehart aboard a ship in the 1920s. 

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Whodunit: The Musical (inspired by Rinehart).

The Actors Theatre of Indiana will be presenting Whodunit: The Musical from January 31 to February 16, 2025, at Allied Solutions Center for the Performing Arts' Studio Theater in Carmel, IN. Written by Ed Dixon, the musical is based on Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Circular Staircase (1908) and Rinehart and Avery Hopwood's subsequent successful play The Bat (1920). Bodies begin dropping amid skullduggery at a house in Connecticut.

The return of Rinehart's The Bat.

On October 27, the Somerville Theatre (MA) will show the silent film The Bat (1926), directed by Roland West; it is based on the play by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood, which adapted Rinehart's The Circular Staircase (1908). A live score by Jeff Rapsis will accompany the film. 

On November 1, AFI Silver Theatre (MD) will show the film with live musical accompaniment by Ben Model. Undercrank Productions has released a digital restoration of the film on DVD with a score by Model.

Rinehart made millions from The Bat. Review of the film from the 19 Jun 1926 Edmonton [Canada] Journal: "persistently challenging audiences to identify the arch criminal behind the stirring trail of mystery" ... a "peppery melodrama." The 16 Aug 1908 Baltimore Sun wrote regarding The Circular Staircase, "The story is well and vigorously written, the plot, barring a few inconsistencies, first-class, the dénouement unforeseen and the characters vivid and interesting."

Lou and Herbert Hoover, mystery fans.

On "Hoover Heads," the blog of the Herbert Hoover Library and Museum, Thomas F. Schwartz has written a series of posts on First Lady Lou Henry Hoover and President Herbert Hoover as mystery fans. 

• The friendship of the Hoovers with author Mary Roberts Rinehart.
  
  
• Mystery writers read by the Hoovers, pt 1. (Margery Allingham, Dashiell Hammett, Ellery Queen, Dorothy L. Sayers, S. S. Van Dine)
  
  
• Mystery writers read by the Hoovers, pt 2. (The Detection Club)
  
  
• Mystery writers read by the Hoovers, pt 3. (Margery Allingham, Dashiell Hammett)
  
  
• Mystery writers read by the Hoovers, pt. 4. (Lawrence Saunders, aka John Burton Davis and Clare Ogden Davis; Harry Stephen Keeler)
  
  
  
• Mystery writers read by the Hoovers, pt. 5. (Carolyn Wells)
  
  
• Mystery writers read by the Hoovers, pt. 6. (Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers)
  
  
• Mystery writers read by the Hoovers, pt. 7. (Freeman Wills Crofts, Robin Forsythe)
  
  
• Mystery writers read by the Hoovers, p. 8. (Harry Ashton-Wolfe)

(Photos: Herbert Hoover, Lou Henry Hoover: NYPL)

Avery Hopwood, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and "The Bat."

Avery Hopwood with dancer Rose Rolanda, n.d.
Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Div

In the Cheboygan [MI] Daily Tribune, Kathy King Johnson discusses playwright Avery Hopwood (1882–1928) and "The Bat," his wildly successful theatrical collaboration with Mary Roberts Rinehart. The play, which debuted on Broadway in 1920, features a houseful of guests contending with a master criminal dubbed "The Bat."

Homes of local mystery writers.

The website DC Writers' Homes—a project of Humanities DC—features residences of such writers as James M. Cain (6707 44th Ave, University Park, MD), Roald Dahl (2136 R St NW in DC), Rudolph Fisher (1607 S St NW in DC), Lucille Fletcher (3435 8th St S, Arlington, VA), Mary Roberts Rinehart (2419 Massachusetts Ave NW and 2660 Woodley Rd in DC), and Manley Wade Wellman (400 Shepherd St NW in DC).

Mary Roberts Rinehart with chauffeur outside her
home at 2419 Massachusetts Ave NW in
Washington, DC (now the Embassy of Zambia).
ca. 1920s-early 1930s. Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Division

"The Story of All Writers."

Mary Roberts Rinehart, 1926. Library
of Congress, Prints and Photographs Div.

You can read Mary Roberts Rinehart's "Writing Is Work" on the Saturday Evening Post Web site, which she published in the 11 March 1939 issue. Despite her long success as an author, Rinehart wrote, "Even today my wastebasket sees far more words of mine than the public ever does, and it is only twelve years since, with a novel half completed, I walked downstairs to the furnace and burned the whole thing. . . . .At the end of a nine-hour day . . . I may have to soak my right hand in hot water for some time, and my head feels as though it is filled with mush."

CFP for essay collection on the cozy.

La Salle University's Phyllis Betz (Katherine V. Forrest: A Critical Appreciation; Lesbian Detective Fiction: Woman as Author, Subject and Reader) plans to compile a collection of essays on the cozy mystery. Prospective topics/approaches of interest include the following:

• Discussion of authors, including precursors such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, Anna Katharine Green, and Agatha Christie

• Settings
  
• Main characters, including their careers
  
• Other characters
  
• Themes
  
• Subgenres such as the gothic cozy and cozy noir
  
• Problems, including the definition of the cozy and those authors who can be defined as cozy writers
  
• Narrative strategies

Have questions or seek further information? Contact Betz.

"Novel Appeal" (1957).

Mary Roberts Rinehart.
NYPL

Claudette Colbert plays author Mary Roberts Rinehart in "Novel Appeal," a 3Dec 1957 episode of Telephone Time that dramatizes Rinehart's part in exonerating a man convicted of murder. Directed by Arthur Hiller, the episode costars John Carradine.

The real-life case involves the 1896 murders on the Herbert Fuller of Captain Charles Nash; his wife, Laura Nash; and August Blomberg, the second mate. Thomas M. C. Bram, the first mate, was convicted of the crimes in a second trial held in 1899 and originally was sentenced to death; his sentence was changed to life imprisonment after a Supreme Court appeal.

According to Rinehart (see "Mary Roberts Rinehart Shows How Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction" and her autobiography My Story), a Pittsburgh lawyer told her about the case, and she subsequently read about it in a magazine for lawyers. Her choice for the perpetrator was the ship's Scandinavian wheel-man, Justus Leopold Westerberg, who was nicknamed Charley Brown. Westerberg had tried to kill his nurse while he was a patient in a mental hospital. A fictionalized version of Brown, Charlie Jones, appears in Rinehart's novel The After House (1913). The After House began serialization in McClure's in June 1913, attracting further interest to the case, and Bram was paroled in August 1913. 

As Reader's Digest editor Fulton Oursler (aka mystery writer Anthony Abbot) relates in The Mystery Bedside Book (ed. John Creasey, 1960), Theodore Roosevelt read The After House and called on Rinehart. Oursler states that Roosevelt concurred with Rinehart's view of the case and wrote President Woodrow Wilson, asking for a pardon for Bram. Wilson granted the pardon in June 1919. Bram went on to captain the ship Alvena and to own a restaurant in Florida.

"The Artists Who Make Argosy."

4 Nov 1922 Argosy cover by
Stockton Mulford

In advance of July's PulpFest in Columbus, OH, Mike Chomko gives a preview of "The Artists Who Make Argosy," the upcoming session with David Saunders that will celebrate the contributing artists to the legendary pulp magazine launched in 1882. The magazine's contributing writers included Max Brand, Norbert Davis, Erle Stanley Gardner, Robert E. Howard, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and Cornell Woolrich. Saunders is the son of illustrator Norman Saunders.

Foxwell on American women in World War I.

Over on Ed Gorman's blog I discuss my new collection In Their Own Words: American Women in World War I, describing its background, mentioning some of the women featured in it, and discussing their varied roles in the war. As I explain, "I set out to collect first-person accounts of U.S. women that dated from the war period, wanting the immediacy and the 'I was there' point of view." Mystery fans will be pleased to find two pieces by Mary Roberts Rinehart included in the collection (publication date is September 25).

There is an additional resource: my new blog, American Women in World War I, where I cover women for whom I could not find a first-person account.

Mary Roberts Rinehart's poem "The Detective Story" (1904).

Mary Roberts Rinehart, ca. 1915
Library of Congress,
Prints & Photographs Div.

A few years before Mary Roberts Rinehart published her first mystery novel The Circular Staircase (1908, sent to American servicemen during World War I), she wrote an engaging poem, "The Detective Story," which appeared in the May 1904 Munsey's Magazine. A tearsheet of this can be found in her papers at the University of Pittsburgh.

The Detective Story
by Mary Roberts Rinehart

A murder is committed, and that page is full of gore,
Of smashed and broken furniture, and blood-stains on the floor.
A livid, ghastly corpse is quite essential to the tale,
And people standing round with trembling knees and faces pale.

Now introduce the town police, and ridicule their chief;
The way they miss the plainest clues is almost past belief.
Then, when they give the mystery up and start to leave the place,
Bring in the great detective with the shrewd and kindly face.

Now arm him with a camera, tape-measure, microscope;
At once he sees a thumb-print on a nearby cake of soap.
A speck of human cuticle is found upon the towel;
And now the great detective knows who did that murder foul!

Upon the floor he spies a pile of white tobacco ash—
With microscope in hand he's on his knees there in a flash.
"Aha!" he says at length. "The villain smoked a Henry Clay!
This is no common scoundrel, and he isn't far away."

He works with ready camera and piles up evidence,
While all the local force stand by and feel like thirty cents.
He pulls out secret drawers that no one ever dreamed were there,
And probes with needles fine and long the cushions of each chair.

With measure in hand he crawls along the hard-wood floor,
And measures all the scratches from the chimney to the door.
At last he rises, smiling. "Well, his shoes are B, size eight,
And by the length of stride he's five feet nine when standing straight.

"He wore a black and white checked suit; see, here I find a thread.
A soft slouch hat he had, crushed down upon his curly head.
How can I tell? Why, see this mark upon the dusty stand,
And on the chandelier I found this single curly strand.

"Now, then, we have a picture of the murderer complete,
His hat, his hair, his clothes, his height, and even size of feet.
Now just go to the window and look out—no need to hide—
For there's the man we're hunting walking down the other side!"

ENVOY
Oh, thanks to British Conan Doyle, to French Gaboriau.
And also many thanks to our own Edgar Allan Poe.
To them we owe a debt of gratitude that's hard to pay.
For teaching us to frustrate crime in such an easy way!

Rinehart's The Bat (film, 1926).

Ad for The Bat. 
Film Daily Jan-Dec 1925

The smash play "The Bat" written by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood first appeared on screen in this silent film version of 1926. The cast included Jack Pickford (brother of Mary).

Vintage Paperback Index, BGSU.

Edgar winner
Lawrence G. Blochman
from UC-Berkeley's
The Blue and Gold (1922)

As a fan of Dell mapbacks, I'm enjoying prowls through the 1940s-70s cover art in the Vintage Paperback Index at Bowling Green State University's Browne Popular Culture Library. Mystery authors represented include Lawrence Goldtree Blochman, Robert M. Coates, George Harmon Coxe, Mignon G. Eberhart, A. A. Fair (aka Erle Stanley Gardner), Leslie Ford, Brett Halliday, Dashiell Hammett, Geoffrey Homes, Baynard Kendrick, Helen McCloy, Zelda Popkin, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Rex Stout, and Phoebe Atwood Taylor. It's also not without its pleasant surprises such as the inclusion of Lloyd C. Douglas (The Robe, Magnificent Obsession) for Doctor Hudson's Secret Journal and C. W. Grafton (father of Sue) for The Rope Began to Hang the Butcher and The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope. In addition, there are items for western fans (The Law at Randado by Elmore Leonard) and sci-fi aficionados (Rocket to the Morgue by Anthony Boucher; Invasion from Mars ed. Orson Welles).

Foxwell on supporting players, Femmes Fatales.

Miss Clack (Cynthia Etherington, left)
wields her tracts before a skeptical
Rachel Verinder (Vivien Heilbron)
in The Moonstone (1972)

Today on the Femmes Fatales blog I'm talking about five of my favorite supporting characters in mysteries: Grandmama (Anne Perry), Miss Drusilla Clack (Wilkie Collins), Wilson Budd Hotchkiss (Mary Roberts Rinehart), Cordelia Thorn (Ellen Hart), and Ramses Emerson (Elizabeth Peters).

Rinehart's "The Bat" with Helen Hayes (1960).

Yet another adaptation of the successful Avery Hopwood-Mary Roberts Rinehart play The Bat about a notorious killer menacing a household, this March 1960 episode of the Dow Hour of Great Mysteries features Helen Hayes, Jason Robards, and Margaret Hamilton. (See earlier post on the 1959 film with Vincent Price and Agnes Moorehead.)

Rinehart's Hilda Adams, on screen.

Two films that star Mary Roberts Rinehart's nurse-sleuth Hilda Adams are Miss Pinkerton (1932), featuring "staggering suspense!" with Joan Blondell and George Brent, and The Nurse's Secret (1941), with Lee Patrick (the character is called "Ruth Adams" in this version).  

Vincent Price in Rinehart's The Bat (1959).

Vincent Price and Agnes Moorehead star in the third film of the 1920 play by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood. Moorehead is a mystery writer hosting an array of guests searching for hidden money, as the notorious killer The Bat threatens the residents.

Christie's Seven Dials Mystery adaptation.

Cheryl Campbell in
The Seven Dials Mystery

BFI Screenonline looks at the 1981 TV version of Agatha Christie's The Seven Dials Mystery, which features John Gielgud and Cheryl Campbell, and sees the influence of U.S. author Mary Roberts Rinehart in the adaptation.

Steal this book.

As the October 15, 1922, Library Journal reported in "Favorite Books of the Lightfingered," the books of mystery writers were the most

Sax Rohmer, from the
New York Tribune,
Apr 18, 1920

popular ones taken from the Grand Rapids Public Library, along with those of adventure and western authors. Among those most popular with thieves:

• Zane Grey, including 3 copies of Rainbow Trail (1915)

• E. Phillips Oppenheim

• Mary Roberts Rinehart, Amazing Interlude (1918) and More Tish (1921)

• Sax Rohmer, The Golden Scorpion (1919; "a galloping, breath-taking yarn" according to its advertisements)