Single Women, Violence, and Class: Mary Roberts Rinehart

Abstract

Mary Roberts Rinehart not only figures among the early practitioners of the crime genre in the United States but also reigns as one of the bestselling authors of the twentieth century. ¹ She published her first mystery novel, The Circular Staircase, in 1908, and her second, The Man in Lower Ten, appeared on the bestseller list in 1909. ² Her works sold well for the rest of her life, and many of her mysteries are still in print. In addition to mysteries, she produced romances, plays, travel writing, and journalism. Among devotees and scholars of crime fiction, Rinehart is well known, but the labeling of her work as mysteries or crime novels places on them the stigma of “genre fiction.” Gordon Hutner, for example, intentionally excludes genre fiction from his expansive What America Read, although not because he discounts its importance to readers; rather, Hutner points out that the plots of mystery novels “index a collectively felt sense of challenge to readers’ social aspirations, fears, personal and political virtues. Taken together, they provide a glimpse into the imaginary life of the republic” (85). He leaves them out of his study because he believes that realism counts as the “ordinary, that is, the fiction against which academic tastemakers later needed to contradistinguish the best” (1).