The Circular Staircase

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Overview

When Rachel takes a country house for the summer with her niece and nephew, she expects to fill her days with relaxing social activities. But these plans take a turn for the sinister when, on the second night, a dead body is found at the bottom of the house’s circular staircase.

Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Circular Staircase is credited with creating the “Had I But Known” genre of detective fiction.

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Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781443444415
Publisher:	HarperCollins Canada
Publication date:	02/24/2015
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	196
Sales rank:	523,067
File size:	329 KB

About the Author

Often referred to as the American Agatha Christie, Mary Roberts Rinehart was an American journalist and writer who is best known for the murder mystery The Circular Staircase—considered to have started the “Had-I-but-known” school of mystery writing—and the popular Tish mystery series. A prolific writer, Rinehart was originally educated as a nurse, but turned to writing as a source of income after the 1903 stock market crash. Although primarily a fiction writer, Rinehart served as the Saturday Evening Post’s correspondent for from the Belgian front during the First World War, and later published a series of travelogues and an autobiography. Roberts died in New York City in 1958.

Editorial Reviews

It was with [The Circular Staircase] that Mary Roberts Rinehart really found her voice: the indefinable, unmistakable, individual cadence that can be copied but never quite satisfactorily matched.”

from her book Had She But Known Charlotte MacLeod

My dear Mrs. Rinehart, I have read The Circular Staircase not only with pleasure, but with thrills and shivers.”

Hewitt Howland

Because they have entered the public domain, many more vintage mysteries have been appearing in the audiobook format. There are numerous productions of this Mary Roberts Rinehart classic about a wealthy, urbane spinster who rents a remote country estate. Rinehart has been labeled the Agatha Christie of America, but her female detective is unlike Miss Marple. Patrician Rachel Innes, as portrayed by narrator Aimee Lilly, has both an understandable hauteur and a generosity of spirit that makes the listener forgive her condescension. Lilly conveys the mood of the story’s time period and nails the characters’ various socioeconomic classes. Additionally, she delivers an exciting puzzle featuring secret rooms, cryptic notes, ghostly images, odd noises, and, of course, dead bodies. D.L.G. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine

JULY 2022 - AudioFile