Mary Roberts Rinehart

Those who have read “K” will find many commonalities between the life of author Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958) and her heroine Sidney Page’s. Mary frankly confesses to having used her own childhood neighborhood in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, as a model for the Street, and her own family’s home will also sound familiar to readers. Born in 1876, Mary grew up in a gray brick house on Diamond Street owned by her paternal grandmother, which was occupied by as many as ten members of the Roberts family, including Mary, her parents, and her younger sister. Grandmother Roberts, widowed with five children when Mary’s father Tom, the oldest, was 13, took in sewing to support the family. As aunts and uncles eventually moved out to start their own households, Mrs. Roberts rented rooms to boarders, a common practice in the day.

The neighbors, too, seem familiar: There was a deaf and dumb insurance salesman, and a German family that owned the butcher shop (but in real life, the daughter murdered both her parents with a cleaver). There was even a doctor on Mary’s street—but she was a woman, for some time shunned by the neighborhood except in extreme or pediatric cases. Mary, however, was star-struck and hoped to become a doctor too. But family fortunes failed when her father, an inventor at heart who lacked the drive to market his ideas, was likewise unable to earn much in his main profession of salesman. (He invented a rotary bobbin for a sewing machine but turned down an offer from a manufacturer to buy the patent. Lacking the ability to negotiate a better deal—percentage of profits could have made him very wealthy—Tom was unable to pay to renew the patent when it lapsed, and the idea was promptly snapped up and is now a standard in the sewing industry.) So Mary’s mother also took in sewing and boarders as a means to earn money.

Mary’s dream of attending college—and medical school—no longer affordable, she decided to try nursing at the nearby Pittsburgh Homeopathic Hospital’s nursing schools, one of the first in the country. She sought help at the office of the longtime family doctor—but he happened to be away for the summer and had left a younger physician to fill in. So Dr. Stanley Rinehart, who had just finished his internship, agreed to give Mary a tour of the hospital where his older brother Clarence, also a doctor, worked and taught at the nursing school. What she saw impressed her, so she applied on the spot, lying about her age and taking up residence in the nurses dormitory in August 1893, just six days after her 17^th birthday. It was still a new career; the first professionally trained nurse in the U.S. had just graduated 20 years earlier, and at that the entire city hospital had only two bona fide registered nurses. Her time in nursing school was demanding in many ways; her first week when cleaning the operating room, she found a foot in a bucket. It also served her writing; Dr. Rinehart once chewed out a nurse who had bungled the sponge count.

During a smallpox epidemic, when Mary was charged with caring for quarantined patients—which meant remaining in quarantine herself—she became better acquainted with Dr. Rinehart, and asked him to help her learn German. He bought her a German book and invited her to stop by his office so he could help her with pronunciation. Soon they were taking secret buggy rides together—fraternization among the staff being strictly forbidden—and the pair became engaged. Hospitals being what they are, however, it was not a secret long. But when Dr. Rinehart was hauled before the board of directors for his crime, he loudly insisted that he planned to marry Nurse Mary Roberts and furthermore was going to take her for a ride in his buggy! Mary went with shaking knees.

When Mary was nineteen in 1896, in quick succession her grandmother died falling down a flight of stairs and breaking her neck, a young cousin was killed by a train, and then Mary’s father checked into a hotel room and shot himself, news she learned from a newspaper headline on the train home. Five months later, four days after graduating from nursing school, Mary married Stanley. She left work—married women were in fact forbidden to work as nurses—though she did find herself sought after in her new marital abode when calamity struck and the doctor was not available. Her first child, one of three boys, was born nine months and four days after the wedding, shortly after she turned 21. After the birth of her third son, she hemorrhaged so badly she could not have any more children. Her nursing skills came in handy as she saved her son Ted when he drank carbolic acid, and retrieved some shoe buttons swallowed by son Alan. When her youngest was two, she began to try writing—having sold two stories for $1 each to a newspaper when she was 15, and two poems a couple years earlier. A stock market crash in 1901 put the couple—just beginning to become financially successful—in a deep hole, so the maids were let go. Mary began writing in earnest in 19067, turning out serials—stories published in weekly installments in magazines. Mary’s uncle encouraged her to have one published as a book—and so The Circular Staircase was published in 1908. It was a best seller, and pioneered the “had I but known” school of mystery writing in which the (usually female) protagonist, now with 20-20 hindsight, laments that she’d followed the wrong course of action (frequently withholding information from those who might have benefited from it), which had allowed a further series of unfortunate events to unfold.

With her new riches and a ridiculously prolific pen, Mary bought an enormous but dilapidated mansion in Sewickley, paying for the renovations and upkeep—a total of $90,000, at a time when the average annual household income was $750—out of her own earnings in 1912. Fortunately writers’ block was never a problem; she seemed to churn out articles and books effortlessly, hampered only by her cramping fingers, as she wrote longhand her entire career, never learning to type. In 1914, while falling asleep, a picture came to Mary, the memory of her husband railing about the surgical sponge count. In her waking hours the idea grew to include a number of characters, including two brothers, both doctors; and another man, neither shabby nor rich, walking alone down the street where she had grown up. The idea took hold rapidly—but her hand gave out, so she called in a secretary and dictated what she soon decided was too much of a mess. She rewrote what she had already done but still lacked faith to finish, so she handed it over to her husband to read and paced the floor while he read until the verdict came in—“This is far and away the best thing you’ve ever done,” he told her. And so “K” was completed in 1914 and published the following year, her tenth book.

World War I broke out that fall, and Mary took an assignment to inspect field hospitals in Europe. She talked her way into a pink card—a sort of free pass entitling the bearer to military protections; hers was the fourth issued—for the Belgian front lines. She spent two months there, the first American reporter on the front lines, hiking the bomb craters and trenches with an extremely knowledgeable but mysterious guide, and writing articles for the Saturday Evening Post. She also wangled an interview with King Albert of Belgium and the first interview ever with Queen Mary of Britain (grandmother of the recently deceased Queen Elizabeth II).

Camping on the Flathead River

in Glacier National Park

Back in the U.S., Mary fell into a depression when her articles attempting to portray the horrors of war were eviscerated by editors fearful of a delicate American sensibility, but she ultimately wrote a more honest book about the experience. Based on her new reputation as a fearless wanderer, she was invited to tour Glacier National Park, then less than a decade old. It was not an easy trip—the party was up at 5:00 am, inched up steep mountain passes via narrow trails on horseback, and slept on only a ground sheet and a few blankets. But Mary thrived and turned out a travel journal called Through Glacier Park that was a catalyst in creating the dude ranch industry. She also met several Blackfeet Indians, who recognized a woman who could get things done and adopted her into their tribe. Ever quick to take up a noble cause, when Mary left Montana her next stop was Washington, where she regaled the Secretary of the Interior with stories of the Blackfeet’s exploitation and degradation—and supplies and an investigation were launched before she was back at her hotel.

She went back to covering the war, as well as writing some comedies when the strain became too much—and when the war ended, she was the second-highest paid living writer, behind J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan. She was writing plays as well, and one called The Bat debuted in August 1920; it was the story of a young woman and her guests stranded during a storm in a rented house searching for stolen money they believe is hidden there while being stalked by a masked criminal called “the Bat.” It was a huge success and spawned three films—and inspired Bob Kane to create Batman.

The Rineharts moved to Washington so that Dr. Rinehart could work at the surgeon general’s office and then the Veteran’s Administration during the Harding administration, staying on after Harding died. Her oldest and youngest sons formed their own publishing house, Farrar & Rinehart, in 1929; though Mary had no hand in the formation of the business, she did throw the formidable weight of her publishing rights behind the venture. Her first book for the fledgling company, The Door, was turned out rather more quickly (and some say with less care) than her usual mysteries, and it is in this book that the butler did it—and though the phrase did not appear in her book, nor was it the first book in which the butler was guilty of the crime, she is commonly credited with this line.

It was thought to be a bit of a cop-out to pin a crime on an “unworthy” person, but ironically Mary was almost the victim of such a crime herself, at the end of her career when a 25-year employee who essentially ran the household seems to have been pushed over the edge when she hired someone to supervise him. He attempted to shoot her in the face, but the gun misfired; then after being subdued by the chauffeur, while Mary was telephoning the police, he came at her again with a knife in each hand, again to be subdued by the chauffeur and the gardener. The man committed suicide in jail that night.

Mary had always been a big spender and a poor accountant, and when the stock market crashed in 1929 ahead of the Great Depression, the Rineharts lost a lot of money—and initially Mary’s ability to write dried up as well. But when her husband’s health began to fail in 1931, Mary picked up her pen again and came up with Miss Pinkerton, a novel starring a nurse who is also a detective. Dr. Rinehart became increasingly ill and died the following year. A year after that, she herself had a heart attack—saved only by her son’s inexplicable feeling that he needed to visit his mother at 1:00 am. She then moved back to New York, to 630 Park Avenue, where she lived the rest of her life.

In 1935 she found a lump in her breast. She underwent a curative mastectomy, ultimately writing an article called “I Had Cancer,” breaking the taboo of silence that shrouded breast cancer in those days. The article broke records for public response and doubtlessly saved countless lives by calling attention to a problem that killed thousands of mortified women annually. The Wall, which Mary considered one of her best mysteries, came out in 1938—to help finance another enormous summer house she had purchased in Bar Harbor, Maine. After 1948 her career began to wind down, and in 1958 she died of a heart attack at the age of 82.

Today Mary Roberts Rinehart’s detective stories still command a wide audience, while her novels (such as “K”) receive a smaller amount of attention. She is known as the lesser-recognized American Agatha Christie—but was much more than that, between her wartime journalism; her short stories, plays and books; and her activism. Even with her writing, mysteries were not the only genre she made her mark on; one critic in 1927 posited that it was not Zane Gray who first depicted in print the American cowboy as he really was, not the mythic hero in a sentimental haze, but Mary Roberts Rinehart in her story Lost Ecstasy of 1927. And if she was not the first author of a nurse romance novel, she certainly elevated the nascent genre with her elegant writing style. It has been suggested that even though she was a celebrity in her heyday, routinely appearing on the best-seller lists, perhaps that the reason she is not better known today is that she did not concentrate in once particular area, but rather enjoyed trying a bit of everything. Whatever the reason she is not as well-known as perhaps she should be, we are nonetheless fortunate that her work—and echoes of her life—survives today.

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