An Introduction to Mary Roberts Rinehart with B. Rae Grosz

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Mary Roberts Rinehart is sometimes called “The American Agatha Christie.” Though her work is now much less familiar to most readers, she was one of the best-selling writers of her time, with her work regularly appearing in The Saturday Evening Post and receiving many reprintings and adaptations on the stage and in film.

This talk will provide an overview of Rinehart’s life(1876-1958)— including her father’s suicide, her training as a nurse, her marriage, her work as a correspondent during WWI, etc. — and how personal experience often informed her fiction writing. We’ll explore the influence of the Gothic in her romance and mystery stories and on the cover art for reprints of her novels. Particular attention will be given to her first novel, The Circular Staircase (1908), and The Bat (1920), a stage adaptation of that novel by Rinehart and playwright Avery Hopwood, and the later film adaptations, such as The Bat Whispers (1930), which helped inspire Bob Kane’s creation of Batman. We’ll also look at Rinehart’s supernatural mystery novels, Sight Unseen (1921) and The Red Lamp (1925), their relationship with popular interest in the spiritualist movement during the 1920s, and Rinehart’s own accounts of personal experience with possible paranormal phenomena.