The Album

The Album may be my very favorite Mary Roberts Rinehart novel — and that’s high praise, indeed! In her day, she was more popular than Dame Agatha Christie, and I wonder that Mary Roberts Rinehart’s name isn’t equally well known.

Equal parts suspenseful mystery and sly social satire, The Album is narrated by 28-year-old spinster Louisa Hall, whose selfish mother ended Louisa’s engagement eight years earlier. Louisa lives in the well-to-do cul-de-sac called The Crescent, where the inhabitants of the five houses are as snobbish and as set in their ways as can be. How snobbish and old-fashioned, Louisa explains to a police inspector:

We are rather a repressed lot, I imagine. We see a good bit of each other, but no one is

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particularly intimate with anyone else. We still leave cards when we call after four o’clock….

In other words, the Crescent practices twee 19th century manners even though it’s now the Great Depression and the early 1930s.

The Album opens with the axe murder of old Mrs. Lancaster, a long-time bedridden invalid who proved demanding and petulant. The servants and the police believe the house was shut up tight, and, therefore, suspect the husband or one of the two middle-aged spinster daughters. But was the murder really an inside job? Rinehart slips in plenty of twists and surprises to keep readers guessing.

Although released in 1933, this whodunit remains as gripping and slyly clever as it was then, and I believe readers will be loving this book just as much on its 100th anniversary. show less

When Mrs. Lancaster is brutally murdered in the quiet community of Crescent Place where only five families reside, a wealth of motives comes to light, and when another murder occurs, Louisa Hall finds evidence the authorities have missed and realizes that she is the only one who can solve the crime.

Louisa is a likeable character who narrates the story. There are a lot of characters to follow and the story jumped around to them as bits and pieces were revealed. This was confusing at times. The story never grabbed me but it was interesting enough to keep me wanting to find out who the killer was.

January 29, 1999
The Album
Mary Roberts Rinehart

In cleaning out Mom’s library a few weekends ago, I came across half a dozen of the Mary Roberts Rinehart mysteries I’d bought years ago in NYC. Their primary attraction at the time had been their wonderfully detailed, grotesque covers! The same artist had done all of them. This one shows the bedroom of old Mrs. Lancaster on a chilly midnight blue background, with the severed head of a woman sitting in an otherwise empty birdcage! An axe is nearby. I checked on Amazon. Com and found that the latest reprints of her books have different covers now, so you can’t get these anymore.

The story itself is macabre, told by 28-year old Louise Hall. Five odd, isolated families live on a large plot show more of land called The Crescent, cut off from the rest of the world. One hot August afternoon, old Mrs. Lancaster is found murdered – with an axe, of course – in her bedroom, and from there goes many theories: the two devoted daughters who have given up marriage and family of their own to care for her; or Jim, a Crescent neighbor who was seen leaving the house…everyone is a suspect, and there’s a lot more murder to come before it’s all over. The butler, a daughter, a neighbor. In th end, the strange, ancient existence of The Crescent is irrevocably changed. show less

I really enjoyed reading this quaint twisty-turny murder mystery.

90. The Album by Mary Roberts Rinehart (read in 1941) I know I really liked this book and I thought Mary Roberts Rinehart was a great author. When I read a book by her recently, K, I was underimpressed indeed.