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Overview
In the decades since her death in 1958, master storyteller Mary Roberts Rinehart has often been compared to Agatha Christie. But while Rinehart was once a household name, today she is largely forgotten. The woman who first proclaimed “the butler did it” was writing for publication years before Christie’s work saw the light of day. She also practiced nursing, became a war correspondent, and wrote a novel—The Bat—that inspired Bob Kane’s creation of Batman.
Born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, before it was absorbed into Pittsburgh, and raised in a close-knit Presbyterian family, Mary Roberts was at once a girl of her time—dutiful, God-fearing, loyal—and a quietly rebellious spirit. For every hour she spent cooking, cleaning, or sewing at her mother’s behest while her “frail” younger sister had fun, Mary eked out her own moments of planning, dreaming, and writing. But becoming an author wasn’t on her radar . . . yet.
Bestselling mystery writer Charlotte MacLeod grew up on Rinehart’s artfully crafted novels, such as the enormously successful The Circular Staircase—“cozies” before the concept existed. After years of seeing Christie celebrated and Rinehart overlooked, MacLeod realized that it was time to delve into how this seemingly ordinary woman became a sensation whose work would grace print, stage, and screen. From Rinehart’s grueling training as a nurse and her wartime interviews with a young Winston Churchill and Queen Mary to her involvement with the Blackfoot Indians and her work as doctor’s wife, mother of three, playwright, serialist, and novelist, this is the unforgettable story of America’s Grande Dame of Mystery.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504042567 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | MysteriousPress.com/Open Road |
| Publication date: | 12/06/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Sales rank: | 483,512 |
| File size: | 21 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
In Rest You Merry (1978), MacLeod introduced Professor Peter Shandy, a horticulturist and amateur sleuth whose adventures she would chronicle for two decades. The Family Vault (1979) marked the first appearance of her other best-known characters: the husband and wife sleuthing team Sarah Kelling and Max Bittersohn, whom she followed until her last novel, The Balloon Man, in 1998.
Charlotte MacLeod (1922–2005) was an international bestselling author of cozy mysteries. Born in Canada, she moved to Boston as a child and lived in New England most of her life. After graduating from college, she made a career in advertising, writing copy for the Stop & Shop Supermarket Company before moving on to Boston firm N. H. Miller & Co., where she rose to the rank of vice president. In her spare time, MacLeod wrote short stories, and in 1964 published her first novel, a children’s book called Mystery of the White Knight. In Rest You Merry (1978), MacLeod introduced Professor Peter Shandy, a horticulturist and amateur sleuth whose adventures she would chronicle for two decades. The Family Vault (1979) marked the first appearance of her other best-known characters: the husband and wife sleuthing team Sarah Kelling and Max Bittersohn, whom she followed until her last novel, The Balloon Man, in 1998.
Read an Excerpt
Had She But Known
A Biography of Mary Roberts Rinhart America's Grande Dame of Mystery
By Charlotte MacLeod
MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
Copyright © 1994 Charlotte MacLeodAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4256-7
CHAPTER 1
As the Twig Is Bent
How the tree inclines may depend on who gets to bend the twig. Some precocious seedlings may prefer to handle that job themselves. Take, for instance, Mary Ella Roberts, born in what was then the city of Allegheny, Pennsylvania, on August 12, 1876, under the sign of Leo. The infant Mamie, as she was dubbed, could not have picked a more congenial zodiacal sponsor. A little over three decades later, as Mary Roberts Rinehart, wife of a hardworking doctor and mother of three little boys, this chubby, blue-eyed baby was to become the most lionized woman in America.
It is doubtful whether, on their firstborn's natal day in the centennial year of the United States, any thought of future glory flitted across the minds of Thomas and Cornelia Roberts. The young parents must have had more immediate concerns, such as whether their wee bundle of joy was going to yell all night and keep the whole household awake. Well might Tom and Cornelia worry, for the old gray brick house on Diamond Street was crammed to the eaves with Robertses.
As to who was head of the house, there could be no question. Tom's mother, widowed since 1863, had supported herself and five children by taking in sewing, one of the few employments by which a respectable woman could make a living. By now her business was thriving, her children grown up and able to lend a hand. Both sons had white-collar jobs. Tom was the eldest of the brood, but his brother John was the real go-getter. He and his beautiful though delicate wife Sarah, called Sade, were already settled in the spacious front bedroom on the third floor when Tom won the heart and hand of pretty Cornelia Gilleland, a farmer's daughter who'd come to the city to get away from her new stepmother.
A young clerk on small wages was in no position to set up housekeeping on his own; Tom followed his brother's example and brought his bride home to mother. This was common practice then, as it seems again coming to be; families stayed together, pooled their resources, and rubbed along until the inevitable breaking point. Tom and Cornelia were cheerfully allotted the front room on the second floor, one flight closer to the workroom where Mother Roberts had set up a few treadle sewing machines and hired seamstresses by the day to help fill her customers' orders.
Mary's earliest memories of Cornelia Roberts, related in her delightful biography My Story, were of a high-colored young woman with a magnificent head of curly hair and a warm contralto voice. She sang all day, and why shouldn't she? Tom's three sisters had welcomed her with open arms. Sade, though less demonstrative, was by no means unamiable. Mother Roberts must have been glad of an extra pair of capable hands in a big old house without running water or central heating, where the laundry was done on a scrubbing board in a washtub, where tea leaves were sprinkled over the carpets to keep some of the dust from flying up under the vigorous but not terribly effective assault of a corn broom in a housewife's hands, where the ever-present clouds of coal dust wafted over from the Pittsburgh steel mills and settled on the white lace curtains that had to be washed and stretched by hand every few weeks.
All these tasks were jam to a farmer's daughter. Cornelia worked and sang with equal fervor while Tom went off every morning in the boiled shirt, starched collar, and top hat that she laid out for him, mulling over his increasing solvency, making plans to start his own business and move his wife and child to a house they wouldn't have to share with anybody. Though his wife seemed in no great hurry to leave the family enclave, Tom himself was finding his mother's domination increasingly onerous.
Both the Gillelands and the Robertses had sprung from Covenanter stock. The Covenanters were stern Presbyterians, Robert Burns's "Orthodox wha believe in John Knox." They had supported Oliver Cromwell against Charles I in the Civil War of 1642–48 and held to their convictions during the Restoration despite sometimes brutal oppression. Many of them had emigrated from Scotland to Ireland; it was from there that Mary's ancestors had pushed on to Pennsylvania.
The Gillelands had evidently stuck to farming; Mary seemed not to know a great deal about them except that they were respectable folk who had worked hard and done well. The Robertses had been mostly teachers and preachers, although one, a postmaster, had run a profitable sideline selling liquor to the indigenous population. Tom might have inherited a few genes from that wicked postmaster; he liked to remind his mother that, while he and his siblings could claim blood relationship to Scotland's great Argyle family, they were also descended from a notorious buccaneer, Bartholomew Roberts.
For Mother Roberts, life was real, life was earnest. The seventh day of the week was for her not the pagan Sunday but the Sabbath, always the Sabbath. Keeping it holy meant not playing the piano, not playing cards, not doing much of anything except behaving yourself and trying to stay awake during the sermon. The household went faithfully to receive their weekly ration of religious uplift, all but Tom. He, to his mother's deep distress, was an avowed agnostic. He did obey the biblical injunction to go forth and multiply, though; when Mary was four, she acquired a baby sister.
Olive's birth raised the family nose count to ten; for the time being nobody seemed to mind. Life in the old brick house went on as usual, cheerful and noisy. On weekday evenings, the three young aunts, Tom's sisters, entertained their gentlemen friends in the parlor, where the old-fashioned rosewood sofa with its slippery horsehair seat must have contributed to an ideal ambience for togetherness. Maybe it was the horsehair sofa that hastened the final breakup. Tillie, Mary's favorite aunt then and forever-more, got herself a new beau; and this one had serious intentions.
Until now, Tillie had stayed home and kept house while her mother sewed. All of a sudden, here she was, swishing through the back parlor in a beautiful gown of dark red taffeta while the minister waited to perform the ceremony and little Mary peeked out from behind the assembled skirts. No eyebrow was raised at Tillie's red wedding dress. In those days a bride-to-be did not have to proclaim herself a virgin by wearing white; it was taken for granted that she wouldn't dare be otherwise until the wedding night.
So Tillie was united with her Joe. The marriage was blessed with nine children and lasted for sixty happy years.
Maggie, the middle sister, never married. She was happy for many years at her job in a department store, except for the time when her boss, described by Mary as a middle-aged man with a roving eye, presented her pretty teenaged niece with some silk stockings. Mary never mentioned to her aunt that he'd also offered to help put them on. She might have been naive, but she certainly wasn't stupid. Maggie stayed with her mother until the household was finally broken up, then she and Mrs. Roberts went to live with Tillie, Joe, and their multiple progeny. As a husband and provider, Joe must have been among the all-time greats.
Not so the cad whom Tish, the eldest sister, got stuck with. He was a floorwalker in the store where Tish clerked for a while, was about twice her age, had already married three wives in succession and cheated on every one of them. He cheated on Tish also, and sponged on the whole Roberts family for money to cover his rubber checks and sundry other defalcations. He really cooked his goose with Mary when he telephoned her husband-to-be before the wedding, pleading for bail money to keep him out of the jail where he surely belonged.
Tish must have had superior powers of self-deception. However outrageous her husband's behavior, she went back to him time and again, believed he meant it when he told her she was beautiful, and mourned him when he departed for that bourne whence none returneth. She taught herself to believe that the checks Mary sent were in fact dividends on her own investments. She also believed that she had been Mary's inspiration for Letitia Carberry, the imaginary Tish who, in a long series of short stories, was to keep America in stitches for years to come. Granted, Mary's Tish had her eccentricities, but she'd at least have known better than to tie herself up to a no-good moocher.
One way and another, the clan was branching out. John's wholesale wallpaper business was making money hand over fist; Sade wanted a home of her own and, of course, got it, a tight little house just around the corner from Mother Roberts. Its great advantage was the stable at the back. Sade, for all her delicacy, was a fine horsewoman, and John was as good or better. They kept a trap in the summer, a sleigh in the winter so that Sade would get to show off her new diamond ring and sealskin coat in fine style. After a while, they moved out of the city to a much nicer house in Sewickley, where Mary was often invited to spend weekends with them.
It was from John that Mary received her love of horseback riding and her loathing of trotting races. Watching Uncle John drive his two-wheeled sulky along a racecourse for hours on end was a desperate bore; getting to sit in her aunt's sidesaddle on John's big bay, Charlie, was a thrill beyond belief. For Mary's debut as an equestrienne, clever Cornelia had fashioned a miniature habit with a long skirt and a fitted basque but had given no thought to those starched ruffles on her daughter's little underdrawers. Mary returned from that first ride badly blistered but once the agony had passed, she was quite ready to try again. In years to come, her uncle's early lessons were to serve her in good stead.
CHAPTER 2Breaking Up and Moving On
John Roberts showed his Covenanter blood more than his siblings did. He'd grown up tall and thin, dour and reserved, inflexible, sometimes irascible. Nevertheless, John was the one whom everyone else turned to in a pinch. These pinches were usually financial, and John never refused to shell out; though sometimes his words to the wise were sufficient. In later years it would be sensible Uncle John who steered Mary on the course that would bring her fame and riches.
The exodus from Diamond Street continued. Cornelia was becoming eager for a change, a second daughter in such close quarters was definitely one too many. Tom was his own boss now; he'd taken on a sewing machine dealership. The ladies who sat in his downtown showroom, shirring and topstitching to demonstrate what fun it was, had been attracting new customers. This was definitely the time for a move.
Like John, Tom didn't take his family far, only to another little brick house a short walk away. One of four in a row, the house he'd rented looked to the casual outsider much like the other three. To Mary there was all the difference in the world.
She could not recall the actual moving, but she retained a vivid memory of being there by herself in the new house. Her parents had parked her in front of the kitchen stove to keep warm and out from under their feet while they dealt with the agonies of getting settled. The stove was new and shiny black. Burning coals glinted from behind the half-open slits in the damper slide. She could smell the linseed oil from the new oilcloth on the floor. Now, she knew what the word home really meant.
Looking back, Mary wrote that she thought her father had instigated the move in order to get away from his mother. That seems likely, although all the young Robertses must have felt the constraint of living with so implacable a conscience. Mary remembered an awesome encounter she'd had with her grandmother when she was very young. She'd woken up late one night and wandered out into the sewing room, startled to find the old lady still sitting there with a piece of unfinished work in her lap, holding a needle up to the light from the overhead gaslamp. Mrs. Roberts's one good eye was squinted up in a painful struggle to see the tiny hole into which she must poke the thread. Her blind eye, reduced to a whitish blur by some old injury, stared straight ahead. She might have been one of the Norns. Mary sneaked back to bed.
Until Olive came along, Mary had been the only child among a congeries of generally well disposed grown-ups; she must have had her share of petting and spoiling. Still, the bars were always around her. She mustn't go uninvited into other people's bedrooms, she mustn't bother the somehow frightening hired seamstresses of whom she caught glimpses sometimes through the open door of that cluttered, ill-lighted back room where the sewing machines were kept. She must be a good girl at all times, particularly on the Sabbath, when everybody was expected to remain aloof from worldly diversions.
His mother's house rules must have rankled Tom especially. Although Mary in her memoirs called her father an agnostic, Tom sounds more like an atheist, as rigid in his own way as Mrs. Roberts was in hers, refusing to entertain even the possibility of a deity or an afterlife, setting himself in vehement opposition to his mother's unswerving belief in a God of wrath who kept a fiery pit well stoked for the unredeemed.
Tom might rail as he chose, but Mother Roberts knew where the pitchforks were kept, and why. How could Mary ever be good enough to escape the fearsome fate that awaited bad little girls? As children do, she invented small terrors to mask the big one. In the new house, her inner panic settled, not surprisingly, on the back bedroom.
There were three upstairs rooms. The biggest was where her parents slept, in a grand new walnut bed with a dresser to match. The second was shared by Mary and Olive. The third and smallest was where the hired girl slept, when Cornelia had one. When she didn't, it was used as a storeroom. That was when the ghosts moved in.
Live-in maids were not then a luxury reserved for the ultrarich. Lots of immigrants' daughters and raw girls just in from the farms were glad enough to do housework for board and room and a dollar or two a week until they found better jobs or more lenient employers. Few girls could come up to Cornelia's standards, so the little back room was often empty and Mary would rush past its door with her heart in her mouth. She never mentioned her private nightmare, but somebody else found it out.
Tom, by nature and inclination an inventor, a muser, and a ponderer, was always open to new ideas. One day he brought a phrenologist home to supper. Phrenology was quite the vogue in that late-Victorian period; the theory was that, by feeling his subjects' cranial bumps and hollows, the practitioner could diagnose their psychological strengths and weaknesses. Which bump tipped this man off, he never revealed. But he really rocked young Mary back on her spring heels when he told her there were no such things as ghosts, and she'd better remember it.
He could also, he said, determine whether a little girl truly loved her parents. Since the phrenologist was the Robertses' dinner guest, since Cornelia was a truly magnificent cook, and since Mary had been taught to behave herself in company, he could hardly not have awarded her full marks in filial piety. That was when Mary began to think he wasn't so smart as he claimed to be. Of course she didn't dare say so.
Parents brought up in the old Covenanter tradition, along with a good many who weren't, still believed that to spare the rod was to spoil the child. Devoted mother though she was, Cornelia kept handy a small whip for educational purposes. Considering how many clothes children of that time and class were made to wear, her chastisements may not have been all that painful. Still, to be struck by a grown-up, whatever the provocation, is a hard thing for a sensitive child to handle. Each flick of the switch only reinforced Mary's secret dread that she wasn't good enough and never would be.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Had She But Known by Charlotte MacLeod. Copyright © 1994 Charlotte MacLeod. Excerpted by permission of MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Cover Page
- Dedication
- Introduction
- Chapter 1: As the Twig Is Bent
- Chapter 2: Breaking Up and Moving On
- Chapter 3: School Days, Rule Days
- Chapter 4: Life and Death Along the River
- Chapter 5: A Great Deal to Learn
- Chapter 6: Where the Brook and River Meet
- Chapter 7: Nurse Roberts Wins Her Cap—and Sets It
- Chapter 8: Love Among the Ruins
- Chapter 9: A Funeral and a Wedding
- Chapter 10: The Doctor’s Wife at Home
- Chapter 11: A Full Life Gets Fuller
- Chapter 12: A Toe in the Water; A Foot in the Door
- Chapter 13: Stagestruck and Stricken
- Chapter 14: From Playtime to Paytime
- Chapter 15: The Rineharts Broaden Their Horizons
- Chapter 16: Cities of Dreams and Nightmares
- Chapter 17: Be It Never So Humble
- Chapter 18: A Lot of Work, A Little Play, A Gathering Storm
- Chapter 19: A Painful Good-bye, A Dubious Welcome
- Chapter 20: On Active Duty
- Chapter 21: A Long, Long Trail A-winding
- Chapter 22: Home Fires and Campfires
- Chapter 23: A Lull Before the Storm
- Chapter 24: Mary Goes Back to War
- Chapter 25: Far Too Many Cactus Plants
- Chapter 26: An End to the War to End All Wars
- Chapter 27: Playtime
- Chapter 28: A New President, A Changing World
- Chapter 29: The Unexpected
- Chapter 30: Shipped to the Desert and “Strong as a Lions”
- Chapter 31: A Time to Remember
- Chapter 32: Crossing the Great Divide
- Chapter 33: Moving On
- Chapter 34: A Story Without an End
- Bibliography
- Image Gallery
- Copyright Page