The Circular Staircase

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

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

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

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

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

Vintage and Retro are all the rage for some stuff like clothes and photography (Instagram?? I don’t get it, but whatever) and so I said ‘what the hell’ and downloaded this 100-year-old mystery novel onto the iPad. A review especially praised the stalwart spinster protagonist and the quaint setting and characters so I felt pretty confident I’d like it. Unfortunately, our stalwart spinster is also a raging racist and the supporting characters were pretty much there to be ordered about, worried over and despised by her in turn. I believe the correct term for her is battleaxe. I was bummed because at first her character reminded me a bit of Amelia Peabody.

Some of the things about the period charmed me; like the summer house rental. show more An estate really, with wings, stables and a gate house, complete with servants most of whom vamoosed when things started to get hairy. The old-fashioned conveyances; a mix at this time of history (1909) of trains, horse-drawn and motorized vehicles. Not sure what a Dragon Fly is, but I suspect it’s the author’s fancy since I found nothing on the web. When women fainted (as they invariably do in novels of this sort) someone ran for some ‘stimulants’. Aunt Rachel sports ‘wrinkle eradicators’ - mysterious and painful sounding. The lights went off at midnight because the electric company shuts down at that time. Funny stuff, but try as I might, the casual racism just took the shine off things for me. I know it’s how people thought and behaved back then, but it’s jarring to read about now.

While I did finish it, I didn’t race through it because it was quite put-downable. In the end I just made myself finish the silly thing. It reminded me a lot of the way Nancy Drew mysteries unfolded. We’ve got a stock bunch of characters and they end up in a place where strange things start to happen to them. Not because of them, but because of their proximity to whatever else is going on. The events that occur happen to them, but they’re not of them if you know what I mean. There’s a subplot that must be discovered. Even the clues are funny compared to how things are written these days. In this one they’re basically all physical - a pistol, a cufflink, a golf stick (not club, stick). Oh and there are funny noises inside the house and mysterious intruders no one sees or is able to capture. The antics of not just the amateurs, but also of the cops to catch these unseen villains, were hilarious. They bumbled around and tripped over one another and never so much as caught the hem of a garment, much less an actual person. Obviously there was a secret room involved, but once again no one could find it; not the good guys or the bad guys. There had to be 5 holes carved into walls before someone found it and then it was on the second try. Dopes. Nancy Drew could have totally schooled these people.

In the end, while I didn’t guess the solution (I wasn’t giving it any thought actually, the story didn’t really grab me enough), I found it a bit tired. I suppose since it’s a relatively early mystery, it wasn’t a cliche when it was written, but it certainly is now. It makes Agatha Christie’s work even more astounding because in my opinion it does hold its appeal. Yes, she wrote the bulk of her novels later than this one, but the earliest ones are pretty close to this time and they hold up much better. Alas, some vintage stories just don’t maintain their appeal into the 21st century. show less

Had I But Known
A review of the Carousel Books eBook (April 10, 2022) of the original Bobbs-Merrill Co. hardcover (1908) of the serialization first published in 5 issues of All Story magazine (1907).

Here was I, Rachel Innes, spinster, a granddaughter of old John Innes of Revolutionary days, a D. A. R., a Colonial Dame, mixed up with a vulgar and revolting crime, and even attempting to hoodwink the law! Certainly I had left the straight and narrow way.

This was a very melodramatic suspense thriller where a woman takes a summer home with her orphaned wards, her niece and nephew. They find themselves embroiled in inexplicable disappearances, mysterious deaths, burned barns, failed banks and an apparent haunting. It did have a curiosity value show more of historical interest. It is credited as the first ever book written in the Had I But Known style, where the protagonist foreshadows events yet to come, over which they have regrets about their choice of action.
Rinehart is also credited as the first writer with a "the butler did it" resolution (in [book:The Door|19097139] (1930)..
See book covers at https://scontent-yyz1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/476604249_29449314114667327_4...
Some cover images of original 1908 Bobbs-Merrill Co. hardcover. A faded original on the left (source Goodreads) and a restored enhanced image on the right (source Wikipedia).

The Circular Staircase betrays its origins as a serialization which first appeared in magazines. Almost all of the chapters end in horrid discoveries and/or cliffhangers compelling the reader to move on to the next episode. The thread is stretched out by having all of the characters hiding information from each other and from the police, in misguided efforts to avoid suspicion. Much of it will seem implausible to the modern reader. There was at least a humorous element as the maidservant Liddy perpetually says she will quit due to the hauntings and murders and Miss Rachel calls her bluff and Liddy stays on regardless.

I read The Circular Staircase as I had been very impressed with Rinehart's investigative procedural short story The Lipstick in the recent anthology [book:Golden Age Whodunits|199359529] (2024). That story was from 1942 though, and was not so implausible.

NOTE: There are no annotations in this supposed "Annotated" edition.

Trivia and Links
Confusingly, this novel is listed in various sources as book #2 in the Miss Cornelia Van Gorder Trilogy. Cornelia Van Gorder was the new name used for the Rachel Innes lead character in a theatrical adaptation of The Circular Staircase called The Bat (1920). The play script was then turned into a novelization as [book:The Bat|12869053] (1926), credited to Rinehart but apparently ghost written by [author:Stephen Vincent Benét|26926]. Rinehart's [book:The Man in Lower Ten|29569154] (1909) listed as book #1 in the trilogy, has no Cornelia Van Gorder character in it.

See poster at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9c/The_Circular_Staircase...
A poster for the 1915 silent film adaptation. Image sourced from an anonymous photographer and designer - Advertisement in Moving Picture World, 1915 (https://archive.org/stream/movingpicturewor25newy#page/n1978/mode/1up), Public Domain, Link.

Aside from its stage adaptation, The Circular Staircase has also been adapted for film several times. There was an original 1915 silent film (now lost) and then another silent film as The Bat (1926). Then there was a early talkie as The Bat Whispers (1930). There was a later remake as The Bat (1959).

Batman creator Bob Kane acknowledged in [book:Batman and Me|606458] (1989), that Rinehart's renamed villain in The Bat adaptations was the inspiration for his later masked vigilante. show less