Meador Manor

American mystery author Mary Roberts Rinehart was described as our version of Agatha Christie. Some years ago I read most of Christie’s 66 detective novels and various short-story collections, excepting the Tommy & Tuppence ones, and at this point I’ve completed a dozen of Rinehart’s 40-odd novels.

Both Rinehart and Christie once served as nurses. Christie volunteered in the British Red Cross during World War I, becoming a paid dispenser, and again worked in a pharmacy during World War II. Her pharmaceutical knowledge of poisons was incorporated into her mystery novels.

Mary Roberts was born in 1876, fourteen years before Christie, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She trained at a hospital’s nursing school, but after graduating, she married Stanley Rinehart, a doctor she had met there, and instead of her pursuing nursing, she invested herself in raising their three sons. The Rineharts lost their savings in a stock market crash in 1903, prompting her to begin writing at age 27 to earn an income. She produced 45 short stories, and in 1907 she wrote The Circular Staircase, which was published in 1908 and would go on to sell 1.25 million copies and spawn four movies and a hit play.

I read that novel in 2020, as my introduction to Rinehart, who would re-use the character of Miss Cornelia Van Gorder in a couple of later novels. Like Christie, Rinehart had some other recurring characters in Leticia “Tish” Carberry and Hilda Adams, but while Christie relied heavily on various recurring detectives, with only about about 1/4 of her output being standalones, the situation was reversed with Rinehart, with 3/4 of her 40-odd novels not featuring recurring characters.

My readings of Rinehart have ranged from her first published novel of 1908 to one from 1945; her final work was published in 1952. Her books are more dated than Christie, often told in first person by a female character with plenty of the “had I but known” foreshadowing that can increase suspense but too often consists of the narrator keeping key pieces of evidence from the police in order to prolong the plot.

Back in 1915, Rinehart’s first novel, The Circular Staircase, was adapted into a silent film. She didn’t get much for the movie rights, and the film was criticized as following the novel too closely to be properly cinematic. That film is one of many from that era that are lost.

A Comedic Touch

Several of Rinehart’s books were comedies, including the latest I read on my Kindle, When a Man Marries from 1909. Its thin plot reminded me of later situation comedies on television, revolving around a group of rich Edwardians who are quarantined together for a week, with a silly deception meant only to last a few hours stretched to its breaking point by the forced confinement.

Rinehart had first written the novella Seven Days, which was adapted into a three-act play for Broadway. Being unfamiliar with script-writing, Rinehart paired up with the young playwright Avery Hopwood, who at that time had only one produced play to his credit. Their Seven Days play was a hit with 397 performances that allowed its producers to retire, although they came out of retirement in 1920 to produce a couple more Hopwood-Rinehart plays.

Rinehart expanded the Seven Days novella into the later When a Man Marries novel, and I found the connection with the play evident in the staging of various scenes in the novelization. I have a feeling I might have enjoyed the novella, or even the play, more.

If you want some comedy, I found Where There’s a Will from 1912 to be more fun. The later book had a far more relatable narrator and featured eccentric folks populating a faltering health spa. Avoid the lousy Audible version by Deavers; Paula Faye Leinweber does a much better job, while the Kindle version is only a buck and of course there’s a free version at Project Gutenberg.

Audiobooks are a mixed bag for Rinehart, since so much of her work is out of copyright and thus does not offer sufficient profit to attract the most professional narrators and producers. You can get a couple of dozen of her works in text form for free at Project Gutenberg.

Rinehart’s last name will sound familiar to some like me with a teaching background. She later helped her sons, Stanley Jr. and Frederick, co-found the Farrar & Rinehart publishing company, leaving Doubleday to have her works published with them. In 1946, John Farrar left the company to co-found Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and the sons’ firm became Rinehart & Company, which later merged with Henry Holt and Company and the John C. Winston Company to become Holt, Rinehart and Winston, a publisher of countless textbooks.

I’m also impressed that after suffering from breast cancer, which led to a radical mastectomy, Rinehart went public in an interview “I Had Cancer” in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1947, encouraging women to have breast examinations. In 1956, she appeared on Edward R. Murrows’ Person to Person television interview show, although I haven’t located a kinescope of it.

The Bat Beginnings

I decided to explore how Rinehart’s first novel was connected to a later play and its three film adaptations. The success of Seven Days early in her career led Rinehart to collaborate again with Hopwood on a musical version of it, Tumble In, in 1919, and they co-wrote two hit plays that debuted on Broadway in 1920. Spanish Love, an adaptation of a Spanish play, had over 300 performances, but it was overshadowed by the tremendous success of The Bat, which premiered a week later.

In 1916, Rinehart had asked producer Edgar Selwyn whether he thought a mystery play would be successful if it kept the mystery unresolved until the end. He said that could be a hit, and she began working on adapting The Circular Staircase. World War I distracted her, with her serving as a war correspondent for The Saturday Evening Post along the Belgian front, and by the fall of 1918 she had only written the first two acts. She asked Hopwood to help her complete it, finishing The Bat in April 1920, with Rinehart called away moments later when her daughter-in-law went into labor.

Her new granddaughter kept Rinehart away from the reading of the play to producers, as well as its rehearsals and its Broadway debut, although she did attend preview performances. It went on to 867 performances on Broadway through 1922, with six road companies touring it, and then 327 performances in London’s West End.

A novelization, The Bat, appeared in 1926. Although credited to Rinehart and Hopwood, it was actually ghostwritten by Stephen Vincent Benét…yes, the Pulitzer-prizewinning poet of John Brown’s Body and the author of The Devil and Daniel Webster and various other works.

The Silent Bat

The play was adapted into three comedy mystery films, all of which are now in the public domain. The first was a silent film in 1926 by director and writer Roland West. It was considered lost for decades until resurfacing in the 1980s and being restored.

I enjoyed the old silent movie, with Louise Fazenda looking great as the comic relief character of maid Lizzie Allen, playing well against Emily Fitzroy’s Miss Cornelia. The ridiculous huge ears on The Bat’s costume were also rather comical.

Director West and cinematographer Arthur Edeson had a flair for dramatic visuals, clearly influenced by German Expressionism. Notably, this was the first film for Gregg Toland, the cinematic genius of Citizen Kane, who was a camera assistant and uncredited second director of photography.

Bob Kane admitted that this film was a visual influence on his Batman comics. Lo and behold, in the silent version we get an obvious inspiration for the Bat Signal, although in this case the image is absurdly explained away as a miller moth stuck on a car’s headlight. However, I will add that Bill Finger was the ghostwriter for Kane, and it was Finger who was responsible for most of the defining elements of the Batman mythos, including the cowl, color scheme, chest bat emblem, the Bruce Wayne alter ego, the origin story, Gotham City, Robin, Commissioner Gordon, the Batmobile and the Batcave, and most of the iconic villains.

The 1926 film introduces too many characters, trying to hide the identity of The Bat. His own attempt to hide his identity was rather hideous, even with its silly ears, as testified to by the overacting of Jewel Carmen, Roland West’s wife, in what would be her final appearance in films.

I couldn’t keep up with all of the characters, given the lack of voices to help distinguish them and my being distracted by the weirdly enormous scale of many of the mansion’s rooms. A disturbing minor aspect of the film is the ridiculous facial makeup applied to Sojin Kamiyama as Billy the Butler, casually described as a “Jap” by Miss Cornelia.

Rinehart’s When a Man Marries also featured a “Jap” butler whose apparent smallpox leads to the quarantine, with the characters comedically caring very little about his welfare. The casual racism isn’t as awful as Christie’s finest book’s original title being Ten Little N******, which was later retitled And Then There Were None, but it does mar the work.

Interestingly, the phrase “the butler did it” originated from Rinehart’s 1930 novel The Door, a lingering pop culture memento of her former influence and popularity. Oddly enough, in 1947, a household employee of Rinehart’s, her Filipino chef for a quarter-century, tried to do it…to her.

In a drunken rage about not being hired as a butler, he attacked the 70-year-old novelist at her summer home in Maine, aiming a handgun at her and pulling the trigger, only for it to jam. She ran into a pantry to call for help with a telephone. He followed her, where he grabbed knives to stab her, but he was overpowered by Rinehart’s chauffeur, whose hand was slashed. The chef committed suicide in jail that night, having crafted a noose from his own clothing. No doubt Rinehart was shocked to become part of a real-life thriller.

The Bat Whispers

Roland West remade his 1926 silent film in 1930 with sound as The Bat Whispers, releasing it in both Academy ratio and widescreen prints, having shot it on both standard film as well as the early Magnifilm 2:1 ratio widescreen process using five-perforation exposures on 65 mm film, decades before Hollywood embraced widescreen formats to offer an alternative to television.

This film was also considered lost, but nitrate prints were rediscovered in 1987 in Mary Pickford’s film archives. As you might know, Pickford had been one of the founders of the United Artists film studio alongside Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith.

The 1930 film shares many setups and compositions with the earlier silent one, but the acting is generally atrocious. Grayce Hampton as Miss Cornelia is too sharp and insulting of the comedic maid character, appallingly overacted by Maude Eburne. The male actors are amateurish and stilted, although at least they are more natural than Tullio Carminati’s rigor mortis portrayal of Detective Moletti in the 1926 silent version, which had reminded me of Alfred Abel in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis…and that is not a compliment. Despite Carminati’s shortcomings, this is definitely a case of the silent predecessor being superior to its sound remake.

There are a few innovative shots in The Bat Whispers, but the terrible acting makes it almost unwatchable. As for film director Roland West, his career was overshadowed by the death in 1935 of his mistress, actress Thelma Todd. Todd was found dead in her car in the garage of West’s estranged wife, killed by carbon monoxide from the car’s exhaust. West rarely worked after that and his divorce in 1938, withdrawing into virtual seclusion, although he did marry actress Lola Lane in 1946. He had a stroke and nervous breakdown in the early 1950s and died in 1952 at age 67.

The Bat Returns

Another film adaptation in 1959 featured Vincent Price and Agnes Moorehead. Moorehead is now best known for her portrayal of Endora in the Bewitched television series from 1964 to 1972. I remember her as Charles Foster Kane’s mother in Citizen Kane, and she received four Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress over her career. The Bat is one of only two films in which she starred as the lead. Moorehead does well in the film, despite some flaws in the script and plot, and she has some fun scenes with Lenita Lane’s comic role as her maid.

Price is his usual reliable self, and he looked forward to doing the film since the stage play had frightened him as a child. However, he was disappointed by the film’s weak script, and his other 1959 roles in House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler had far more staying power.

Interestingly, Gavin Gordon stood out for me in his portrayal of a police lieutenant. Gordon’s career was filled with small and sometimes uncredited roles, but he had a distinctive voice, and for me he was often the most interesting actor in various scenes in The Bat.

The movie was quite low-budget, and it shows with a laughable model of a mansion and some cheap sets, and its wild plot is filled with misleading red herrings. However, I’ll credit director Crane Wilbur and cinematographer Joseph F. Biroc for some classic spooky shots. The throat-slashing claws of The Bat actually come across as rather menacing. However, I was disappointed that the script made Miss Cornelia less capable and intelligent than she had been in the 1926 silent version.

The film played in 1959 in a double feature with Hammer’s The Mummy starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. That would have made for a fun night at a drive-in. The Bat was only 80 minutes long, while The Mummy ran for 88. Films from 1931 to 1963 required a renewal to retain their copyright after 28 years, and The Bat wasn’t renewed, and thus it is now also public domain.

Rinehart Recommendations

I wouldn’t recommend reading The Circular Staircase, and I have no intention of reading The Bat having endured three film adaptations of it.

My favorite Rinehart mystery thus far has been The Window at the White Cat, which was lively, witty, and quite fun. I also enjoyed The After House, a suspenseful tale set on a private yacht in the early 1910s with an axe murderer.

I still prefer the writings of Christie, Pargeter, Penny, and Stewart, but sometimes Rinehart’s dated charms retain their magic. I think my next outing with her might be the first of her Letitia Carberry books, but I’ll enjoy some offerings from other mystery authors first.