#1940 Club: The Great Mistake by Mary Roberts Rinehart & The Hangman’s Whip by Mignon G. Eberhart

As we approach the end of the #1940 Club, here are two American mysteries that I read for the event both of which have for their protagonist, a Miss Abbott. Pat Abbott who has seen her family fortunes plummet down and the death of her parents is happy when she is chosen as secretary by …

Friday’s Forgotten Book: The Album by Mary Roberts Rinehart (1933)

"The terrible domination of the old and helpless..." It is the 1930s. The entire world may be facing the great depression but for five families in the exclusive cul-de-sac called The Crescent life still flows easily with maids (who even remove one's footwear), chauffeurs, laundresses, cooks and other luxuries. Time and manner seemed to be …

Forgotten Books: Five Mysteries by Rhode, Rinehart, Jackson, and Vine

Very brief descriptions of five mysteries read at the fag-end of this year.The Murders in Praed Street by John Rhode (1928)A book which begins extremely well as a man receives a call from a hospital to come and identify a body. He reaches there only to be told that no such call had been made …

FFB: The Window at the White Cat by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Window at the White Cat begins like many other novels: a not so young lawyer/ journalist/ detective being visited by a lady who bewitches him almost at once.Here, our hero is John Knox, a lawyer in his mid-thirties, who is visited by a young nineteen year old girl and is immediately …

Review: The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart

What happens when you take too long finishing a book? You end up butchering it. It happened with Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Circular Staircase. I read Yvette's review of the book sometime back in March. Since I had wanted to read a Rinehart for long and since Yvette was all praise for it, I thought I'd …