The Circular Staircase

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Book Report: Miss Rachel Innes, spinster of circa-1908 Pittsburgh, inheritrix of two children now relatively safely launched into adulthood, and possessor of a large automobile, determines that her town residence needs significant tarting up and, to avoid the attendant chaos and disarray, moves herself, her ladies' maid, and her now-adult charges to Sunnyside, the large and vulgar country home of a local banker. As he, his wife, and his step-daughter (note old-fashioned spelling, it is relevant) are traveling to the almost foreign climes of California, Miss Innes and entourage are left in possession of Sunnyside (a more dramatic misnomer is hard to envision) for the entire summer that renovating Miss Innes's show more home will require. Perfect!

Not so much.

Miss Innes's maid begins the descent into spookyworld. Noises, disappearing people, mysterious presences, all cause her to think Sunnyside is haunted. Hah, says the commonsensical Miss Innes, there's a rational explanation for it all. And there is. Sadly enough.

When people start dying, as in "no longer sucking air," Miss Innes gets a wee tidge tense. When the homeowner's step-daughter shows up, in a state of complete collapse and her ward's evident amour for the girl makes it impossible to turf her out, Miss Innes begins a logical and determined effort to explain the bizarre happenings at Sunnyside. Amid this tough-enough assignment comes the local banker's reported death from far-off California, the revelation that he embezzled A MILLION DOLLARS!! (a Madoff-sized payday in 1908), and the disappearance of the embezzled bank's head cashier (also the amour of Miss Innes's female ward), and the impossibility of keeping good staff conspire to give good Miss Innes many a sleepless night. In the end, all is well, and the redoubtable Miss Rachel Innes possesses all the facts.

My Review: God bless her cotton socks, this lady is just a blast to read about! I like formidable old dowagers. (Lady Grantham aside.) They are so *certain* of their Rightness that it's fun to watch them screw up and fail. This being fiction, the formidable old dowager in question doesn't fail, and manages not to be any more overbearing, opinionated, and adamantine than is absolutely necessary.

Rinehart was a decent writer, and a decent plotter, and so the book offers pleasures in both those measures. It's not going to make the Louise Pennyites abandon the Mistress to read only Rinehart. It's over a century old, and thrills and chills come at a dramatically different pace and price in our time. But frills and furbelows aside, a good figure is a good figure, and this book has a good figure.

Visit your great-grandmother's world for a while. You might surprise yourself with how much you enjoy it. show less

From Amazon:

The Circular Staircase, Mary Roberts Rinehart's classic tale of murder and intrigue in a pre-World War I mansion, is evocative yet strangely modern, a sort of CSI: Downton Abbey, with butlers and maids sprinkled in amongst the bodies and evidence. With elements of romance, white collar crime, class, race, poverty, and privilege, it's a story told with such a deft hand that it will keep you guessing right to the end, all the while keeping you entertained with the trappings of the gilded age and a hint of the supernatural.

My Thoughts:

This book was written and published in 1908...the first novel by a woman that has been described as the American Agatha Christie of her era. Rinehart's special gift was in the evocation of an show more overlying and unremitting atmosphere of unease and potential danger and it is under such an atmosphere of apprehension that she spins her stories. For some time some critics in the literary world have tended to dismiss the novels of Mary Roberts Rinehart as old fashioned. This may apply to superficial details -- such as gas lighting -- but it definitely is not true of the novels themselves which are timeless in their ability to hold the reader in a grip of mystery and suspense. There are racial comments that may offend some, but bear in mind the time in history the book was penned. show less

Published in 1908, The Circular Staircase won't be what you expect: a hyperventilated Edwardian piece, loaded with implausible plot and purple prose. Our heroine, the middle-aged Rachel Innes, proves caustic, intelligent and quite humorous from the very start. Her well-meaning quarrels with her foolish maid Liddy provide great comic relief, and you won't find Miss Innes making the sort of stupid exercises in derring-do that get modern-day heroines nearly killed in today's mystery novels. Nor will you find Miss Innes melting into Victorian hysterics or melodrama. She's not afraid to hide evidence and thwart the police in her quest for the truth about the murder at her rented summer home. Despite being more than a century old, the novel show more doesn't feel dated at all, except for the attitudes to other races.

Is the novel perfect? No. As others have pointed out, there are some plot slip-ups. And Miss Innes' attitude toward Thomas the butler, an African-American, while better than average for the day, will strike modern readers as appalling. That said, you'll thoroughly enjoy The Circular Staircase. show less

My second read of this book and it's almost as good as the first.

I continue to like Rachel; I'd like to think she comes closest to how I'd act in a parallel situation. The humour held up too and I still marvel at Rinehart keeping all the plot points of her story straight. I've read too many contemporary books that have half the plot complexity and holes you could drive a train through.

But the racism is still confronting enough to take me out of the story; Thomas might have been well respected by the characters, and the story a product of its time, but the descriptions and use of vernacular were the bruises on what would have been a perfect peach of a story in my time. And on this second read, I marvelled at how anyone believed so show more pitiful a disguise could have worked so thoroughly for so long.

Still, this is a great story; a gem that shows some things transcend time (in this case almost 110 years): there have always been crafters of labyrinthine plots, there have always been strong women with resourceful intellects, and there is always a place for humour and wit, even in the most extraordinary circumstances.

I'll continue to heartily recommend this book to lovers of a great mystery. show less

Amusing as an early example of the classic type of detective story that would reach its most finished form with Christie and Sayers a couple of decades later. But rather slow-moving, even ponderous, by later standards, not only in its jokes but also in the technical development of the plot, both of which the experienced mystery reader will see coming several chapters ahead of where the author is trying to reveal them.

Surprisingly, I found that the thing that interested me about it more than anything else was the use of the wealthy spinster, Miss Innes, as the viewpoint character. She's the sort of lady who would appear as a minor figure in inter-war novels, endlessly sparring with her elderly lady's-maid and fretting about the Servant show more Problem and mocked as a quaint survival of an earlier age. But here we see the world through her social attitudes, in which doctors, policemen and public officials are all treated as slightly superior sorts of tradesmen, who might exceptionally be permitted to use the front door... show less

Wow, this was so not the book I was expecting!

I was expecting something... I don't know, a bit more staid, maybe? Something with a more linear plot; at just a little over 170 pages it didn't seem there was much room for complex plotting.

Boy was I wrong! Rachel is hysterical: biting wit, sarcastic and pragmatic. Her relationship with her maid, Liddy, provides comic relief throughout the book. And the plotting was labyrinthine! The country house is at the centre of the mystery, and there are so many events, so many threads, so many bodies! I never had half an idea what was really going on and I loathed putting down the book.

The story is told in first person past: Rachel is writing an account of the event long after its resolution and show more frequently speaks directly to the reader. The book is billed as a romantic suspense and the suspense is there, but all romance happens at a remove. I would not, by today's terms, call this at all romantic. It could be argued to be gothic, as the book comes complete with large house, strange noises in the night, candles down darkened hallways and sightings of ghosts, but there's too much humour; I don't think your supposed to laugh out loud while reading a gothic.

The writing is brilliant; I don't think I had one inkling of what was going to happen before it happened. There were at least two plot twists that totally surprised me. Rachel might be the prototype TSTL female, but it didn't bother me here - although at the end I did roll my eyes once.

There was only one thing stopping me from calling this the perfect mystery book. It was first published in 1908 and even in this context it is so blatantly racist it made me gasp out loud. Rachel casually makes the bluntest racial comments, but shows respect and detached affection for the black butler, Thomas Johnson, and the author's intent to make him quietly heroic feels unquestionable (although she does adhere to some embarrassing stereotypes) - but this makes it all the more painful to read. Those three or four sentences in the book tarnished what would have been, for me, a perfect read.

Rinehart was a master of mystery writing and I am, in spite of the distasteful moments, definitely going to check out more of her work. show less

I found this classic mystery about murder in a country home mildly enjoyable, but I wouldn't read another Rinehart title. I enjoyed the protagonist's tart humor and her plucky attitude. The story included just about every mystery cliche you can think of. Perhaps they were not cliches in their time, but I couldn't help rolling my eyes. Oh, and the casual racism didn't help matters, either.