Featured Author:
Mary Roberts Rinehart
Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958) was perhaps the most celebrated female writer in America in the first half of the twentieth century, so much so she has been called “the American Agatha Christie.”
Born Mary Roberts in Pittsburgh, she became a nurse after high school, where she met her husband, Dr. Stanley Rinehart. She began writing to earn money after the stock market crash of 1903, and was soon being published in major magazines like the Saturday Evening Post. She wrote short stories, articles, plays, movies, and novels, and her first mystery, The Circular Staircase, was published in 1908.
In World War I she managed to finagle herself to England and Belgium, where she became a war correspondent, writing about both London and the fighting front. She met kings and queens, and later presidents, as her fame grew. She continued to retain a high level of popularity for many years.
Rinehart is considered the foremost writer of the “Had I but known” school, where the protagonist knows things which could stop the murderer but keeps them to themselves for various reasons. As such her mysteries have not survived as well today as others of the time, with modern audiences considering this type of writing to be melodramatic.
Her other problem with modern readers is her lack of an ongoing series. Writing about Poirot and Marple brought audiences to Agatha Christie, but Rinehart didn’t write that way. She wrote two series, about her characters Tish Carberry and Hilda Adams, each only having five books in them. The vast majority of her novels were standalones. Still, she sold more than ten million books in her lifetime, so she didn’t do too poorly.
This is an imagined interview between CozyMystery.com (CM) and Mary Roberts Rinehart (MRR). It has been synthesized from the autobiography by Mary Roberts Rinehart. All quotes from Mary Roberts Rinehart are her own words. Items in square brackets are where we have altered her words for clarity or to avoid spoilers. Please see the end of the article for source credits.
Early Days
CM: You grew up poor. How did you first get into writing?
MRR: I read before I could write with any ease.
CM: So reading, followed by the desire to write your own stories?
MRR: We learned to read, but not to interpret. We were filled with facts, not all of them entirely accurate[] To the imaginative child school was torture, nothing else.
CM: What was school like?
MRR: I went to school. It was my first real contact with other children, and I did not like it.
CM: But it helped you develop your reading and writing skills?
MRR: It is the early reading which makes the indelible impression, which registers on the clean slate of the child mind.
CM: Even though you didn’t want to be there.
MRR: I was frightfully impatient to grow up. I hated being a child. That precocious reading of mine was probably responsible.
The Unstoppable Energy
CM: Your father was an inventor and your mother ran the household. What did you learn from them?
MRR: I inherited from my mother a sort of fierce driving energy and a practical outlook on life which have been most helpful. But such invention as I have, such dreams as I have dreamed, have come from him.
CM: And ever since then you’ve been working hard.
MRR: I have no interest in slogans, but one day I found one and put it in a corner of a picture on the wall over the desk: “Ideas and hard work are the keys to all success.” It stayed there for a long time.
CM: Even when you were successful and had a chance at a break, you would keep going.
MRR: I could not rest. Years of necessary activity had trained me to work, and without work of some sort I was lost.
The Impact of Nursing
CM: After school you went into nursing, but you never wrote about your experiences.
MRR: I could not write it. It was beyond me… I was too tired, too ignorant. Perhaps I felt it too much. I have never written it.
CM: The things you saw were perhaps too disturbing to write about?
MRR: In writing I was seeking escape.… I wanted escape from remembering, for remembering frightened me. I turned to romance, to crime, to farce, to adventure; anything but reality.
Mysteries and Crime
CM: Why did you turn to writing crime and mystery stories?
MRR: I liked mystery, and it was easy for me. It has always been comparatively simple, although a logical crime story requires more concentration than any other type of writing, bar none. A crime novel is a novel, and requires the technique of the novel. In addition, however, it must have the involved consistent plot, the ability to tell as much as possible, and yet to conceal certain essential facts.
CM: You say this because for the longest time you were dismissed by the critics who preferred true novels of life?
MRR: It has been my contention always that a crime book properly done is a novel, plus a difficult and intricate plot which makes the successful and logical book of this type the most difficult of all novels for the writer.
Family Comes First
CM: How hard was it to keep your books clean when the market was insisting on sex and violence?
MRR: When I began to write my children were young and I determined never to write a line they could not read. In a sense this has been good to me, although for a long time it drove me to romance and crime as opposed to the new realism. I found my readers liked clean books, and I preferred myself to write them.
CM: And family always came before the writing?
MRR: My early determination never to let my work interfere with the family life continues. Once in a while under pressure I will disappear for an hour or so, but those times are rare.
CM: But that must have been more difficult when your children were young?
MRR: While the boys were in school and my husband out, I wrote; when the front door slammed I stopped writing.
Planning
CM: As a mystery writer you came up with plenty of stories in both novel and shorter forms.
MRR: I devised weird and often horrible plots. I could think faster than I could write, devise plots and put them on paper with amazing speed.
CM: And so often you came up with clever twists and turns?
MRR: In the crime novel, of course, the writer begins with the ending. He may and will during the progress of the book change the incidents leading to that ending, but it remains the same in the essential fact.
CM: How do you manage to keep it all together in one story?
MRR: My own method, for what it is worth, is to keep on a sheet of paper the various clues as they emerge, and their part in the buried story; for each clue must be not only a legitimate one, but it must be pertinent to the end, and the solution of the crime must explain it.
CM: Did you ever find errors in your stories when it was too late?
MRR: I never do read my books after they are published.
Being a Writer
CM: Back to finding time to write. How difficult was it for you?
MRR: Some day some one will write a book about that frantic search of the creative worker for silence and freedom, not only from interruption but from the fear of interruption.
CM: And the writing itself?
MRR: Writing in itself is sheer grinding drudgery, and no innate literary impulse seeking expression can alter the fact.
CM: How did you organize yourself?
MRR: Even now I have two desks. One is upstairs [] for invitations and private business. The other is in my study, and on it is kept only my professional work, to avoid distraction.
CM: And your daily routine?
MRR: I would eat as I wrote, and indeed I have continued this custom for the past fifteen years. Even now, in my study in the Washington house, a tray is brought in at one o’clock and placed on a table at my elbow. Sometimes still I forget that it is there.
CM: Your ideas flow while you are writing?
MRR: Any writer will know what I mean when I say that I think at the point of my pen. I can think there, and there only. If throughout the hours away from the desk I were still to be absorbed in the work which lies there, it would be impossible to live a rounded life.
CM: But it’s not easy to get them to come out?
MRR: I am increasingly impatient with those people who believe that writing, the art of writing, is an easy and simple thing. It is as difficult as child-bearing; more so.
CM: Do you have any advice on how to produce ideas?
MRR: When it comes to creation itself, there is little to say. Creative writing remains largely a mystery to those who do it. It is an act of the imagination, translated into words.
CM: But you succeeded at solving the mystery.
MRR: For years I have been touted as the highest paid writer in America. I have never talked prices with other writers, but I doubt if this is true.
CM: Even so, you have been very productive throughout your life.
MRR: For more than forty years I have been writing; often out of necessity, sometimes for escape, but always because it was in me to write.
In Conclusion
CM: You had a adventurous life, full of ups and downs.
MRR: I have had no illusions. Life can be beautiful and sweet, but it can be harsh and terrible.
CM: Do you have life lessons to share?
MRR: [I am] not really convinced about anything, except perhaps the power of love and a God somewhere.
CM: And any last words?
MRR: I am always hopeful that my readers will like my book. And I know too that I have given it the best I have. They deserve it, these readers of mine. I feel that I must never fail them.
Do you have anything to say about this article? Agree or disagree with what we have to say? Let us know in the comments below.
Credits
Mary Roberts Rinehart, My Story: A New Edition and Seventeen New Years, Rinehart & Company Inc, New York, 1948.
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