the butler did it!
Mary Roberts Rinehart, Agatha Christie and more
“Had I but known …”
“The butler did it!”
You probably recognize both phrases as tropes of detective fiction, and both coined by were Mary Roberts Rinehart, the bestselling author some contemporaries called “The American Agatha Christie.”
Christie mysteries like Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile still sell out today, and her iconic Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple continue to inspire motion picture adaptations and Halloween costumes alike. But Mary Roberts Rineharts’s books — some of which outsold Christie’s back in the day! — fell out of favor following her death in 1956.
Her own sleuthing protagonists, Letitia Cranberry and “Miss Pinkerton,” aren’t recognizable to many readers today. When I visited my local library to check out a handful of Rinehart’s titles as research for this newsletter, I couldn’t help but notice
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