Mary Roberts Rinehart wrote all sorts of different things — the small percentage of her works that I’ve read include mysteries, serious novels, funny novels, funny short stories, a Christmas story, and a memoir, and I mostly loved them all. But it’s her mysteries — and mostly her early mysteries — for which she’s most famous. If you’ve heard of any of her books — well, actually, if you’ve been reading Edwardian Promenade for a while, you’ll remember When a Man Marries, which is a wonderful book. But other than that, the one that gets talked about is The Circular Staircase, her second novel, known as the origin of the “Had-I-But-Known” school of mystery fiction. You know: the kind of book where the narrator is constantly irritating you by cryptic references to events you haven’t yet read about.

Anyway, Rinehart’s mystery novels are, in general, a little inconsistent. Some are very well plotted, and some are all over the place, and The Circular Staircase is a good example of the latter. Rinehart piles on mysterious circumstances; as soon as a clue appears to one part of the mystery, a whole other plotline springs up fully-formed from somewhere else. And it’s very clever because, while theoretically you have enough clues to figure out what’s going on, there’s so much happening that it’s hard to sort out which clue goes to which mystery. It’s also kind of exhausting.

Actually, though, I didn’t mean to talk about The Circular Staircase; this post is supposed to be about The Man in Lower Ten, Rinehart’s first novel, which I think is pretty fantastic. As in The Circular Staircase, you’re given a lot of clues, but in The Man in Lower Ten, they mostly come at the beginning. and instead of the chaos spawning more chaos, it’s slowly put into order. Also, it’s a train murder story — and there’s something about those that always gets me — but not just a train murder story. Actually, it might be the first train murder story — it was published in 1906.

The narrator, Lawrence Blakeley, is a lawyer and a pretty likable guy. He’s on his way home from getting a deposition when he’s the victim of a mix-up on the train: first his sleeping compartment, when he goes to get ready for bed, turns out to be occupied by someone else. Then, when he wakes up in the morning, he’s not in the compartment he thought he went to sleep in and the important papers he was carrying are nowhere to be found. Also, there’s a dead guy in his former compartment, and several signs point to Blakeley as the murderer. He’s about to be arrested when the train crashes, which kills almost everyone on the car (although as the story goes on, other people who were there keep popping up and being like, “oh, by the way, I survived too!”). The only evident survivor when Blakeley wakes up is Alison West, the girl his best friend is hoping to marry. They escape the wreckage together, and by the time Blakeley makes it home we know a) that she’s somehow involved in the mystery, and b) that he’s fallen in love with her. Rinehart is great at developing a romance in the background of a mystery, and I find it particularly enjoyable in this book.

There’s also an entertaining amateur detective, a whole slew of mysterious women, hints of bigamy, and a creepy cat. Rinehart cleverly manages to have the reader know things that the narrator doesn’t and vice versa, which always impresses me. And it’s funny — check out Blakeley’s mental letter to the Pullman Company on the subject of their uncomfortable sleeping compartments: “If they are built to scale, why not take a man of ordinary stature as your unit?” I wrote mentally. “I can not fold together like the traveling cup with which I drink your abominable water.”

I was misled by Wikipedia and read The Circular Staircase first, but if I could somehow introduce myself to Rinehart for the first time again, I’d choose this.

Vintage Reviews: When a Man Marries

The Man in Lower Ten at Project Gutenberg

Visit Melody’s blog, Redeeming Qualities for more vintage reviews and commentary!

I suppose it’s ridiculous to genuinely enjoy Elinor Glyn, but I can’t help it. When she’s not making her characters passionately miserable about each other, she has a delightfully catty sense of humor, and nowhere is it more in evidence than in The Visits of Elizabeth, her first novel, published in 1900.

The Visits of Elizabeth

Elinor Glyn

The novel consists of the letters of Elizabeth to her mother, and I can’t put the premise any better than Glyn does:

“It was perhaps a fortunate thing for Elizabeth that her ancestors went back to the Conquest, and that she numbered at least two Countesses and a Duchess among her relatives. Her father had died some years ago, and, her mother being an invalid, she had lived a good deal abroad. But, at about seventeen, Elizabeth began to pay visits among her kinsfolk.”

Her “kinsfolk” are all wealthy and nearly all titled, and she meets a lot of the same people as she goes from house party to house party. People are constantly falling in love with her, which is very entertaining, but it’s clear pretty early on that Harry, the Marquis of Valmond, is the one she’s interested in — even if she doesn’t realize it herself. But he’ll have to end his affair with the snide South African Mrs. de Yorburgh-Smith before Elizabeth can accept him as a suitor.

Elizabeth is a delightful character, beautiful, unaffected, innocent, and very, very sharp. Her innocence prevents her from seeing the implications of her observations (when she sees a shadowy figure wandering the halls at night, she thinks it’s a ghost, while it’s obvious to everyone else that it’s a man visiting a woman’s bedroom) and it should all be horribly coy, but it isn’t. And it’s a satirical book, but not in a mean way. Or, at least, it’s only mean in the way that young girls are when they think anyone over forty is elderly. Elizabeth skewers her friends, relatives and acquaintances with her wit, but she doesn’t realize she’s doing it, which somehow makes it all okay.

The Letters of her Mother to Elizabeth

I always wonder, when I’m reading The Visits of Elizabeth, what on earth her mother can be saying to her in her replies. And, because Glyn was plagued by anonymous sequel-writers, we get to find out at least one person’s opinion. William Rutherford Hayes Trowbridge was the author of a number of other novels besides The Letters of her Mother to Elizabeth (published anonymously in 1901), but all I really know about him is that I don’t like him. Trowbridge envisions Elizabeth’s mother as someone as much like Elizabeth as a forty year-old widow can be, but for several different reasons, it doesn’t quite work.

For one thing, I can’t imagine that Elizabeth’s character could be what it is if she was raised by the woman Trowbridge creates. And apparently Trowbridge can’t, either, because he has Elizabeth’s mother imply that the innocence is a front, and that Elizabeth is consciously on the lookout for a wealthy husband. I have no problem with unauthorized sequel-writers on principle, but I do think it’s important to try and make your sequel fit the original work, rather than twisting the original work to validate your sequel. Also, he keeps giving characters names like Blubber and Fruit and Portcullis, which is just irritating.

Mostly, though, the problem is that Trowbridge doesn’t have nearly as light a touch as Glyn, so Elizabeth’s innocence and candor become, in Trowbridge’s picture of her mother, coyness and spite.

Elizabeth Visits America

Elizabeth, Marchioness of Valmond

Glyn did actually write a sequel: Elizabeth Visits America. And while, like the original, it consists entirely of Elizabeth’s letters to her mother, it also gives us an alternative version of how Elizabeth’s innocence might work in a married woman. I don’t know how to describe it, exactly, except to say that, while Elizabeth knows more about the world than she did in The Visits of Elizabeth, she retains a faith in everyone’s good intentions. Her genuine liking for almost everyone she meets takes the sting out of her often ridiculous observations.

In this book, Elizabeth has been married for about seven years, and she and Harry have two children, who they have apparently named Hurstbridge and Ermyntrude, although, to be fair, Hurstbridge is probably a title rather than a given name. A letter from the Vicomte de Tremors, one of Elizabeth’s former suitors, sparks a quarrel, and Harry runs off to Africa to hunt lions or something, while Elizabeth joins her cousin Octavia and Octavia’s husband Tom on a trip to the United States.

Elizabeth waxes philosophical about America’s relative youth as a country, saying a lot of pretty ridiculous things and getting, at times, kind of offensive, but in the most good-natured way possible.  I always enjoy books like this (for another titled-British-girl-visits-America story, try the Williamsons’ Lady Betty Across the Water) because British and American customs were just different enough that hearing about what is and isn’t the same teaches you about both. Even allowing for the probability that Glyn has made everything just a bit more scandalous than it actually was.

Actually, both of the Elizabeth books feel sort of educational at times, Elizabeth Visits America more obviously, with its tours of opium dens, and San Francisco three years after the 1906 earthquake and such, but also The Visits of Elizabeth, which always makes me feel a lot better acquainted with upper crust Edwardian society than any other book I can think of, because Glyn really did hang out with the kind of people she writes about — those of you who are watching Downton Abbey would probably have a lot of fun with it — and I suspect these books would be enjoyable even if they had no basis in real life at all. Really, people don’t give Glyn enough credit.

Elinor Glyn and “Three Weeks”

The Visits of Elizabeth at Project Gutenberg

Elizabeth Visits America at Project Gutenberg

The Letters of her Mother to Elizabeth at Google Books

Visit Melody’s blog, Redeeming Qualities for more vintage reviews and commentary!

To Have and To Hold, by Mary Johnston, was the bestselling book of 1900, and it’s not hard to see why — it’s awesome. It’s the same sort of book as Janice Meredith: adventure, American colonial history, etc. To Have and To Hold just has more pirates and, I don’t know, general craziness. I kind of love it.

To Have and to Hold is set in the early years of the Virginia colony, and follows the fortunes of Captain Ralph Percy, one of the earliest settlers. He’s not wealthy and he’s not politically important and he’s not a real historical figure, but he’s friends with all of those who are. For example: at the beginning of the book, Pocahontas has been dead for three years. Percy remembers her fondly, is best friends with her widower John Rolfe, and respects her brother Nantauquas more than any of the other members of the Powhatan tribe. Although — well, that’s not saying much. Percy has a high opinion of the Indians’ cunning, but a low opinion of their honor.

The story begins when Percy, mostly unwillingly, takes part in a sort of mail-order bride arrangement and ends up married to a young woman who is clearly more than she professes herself to be. How much more isn’t clear until the arrival by ship, some weeks later, of my Lord Carnal, the King’s favorite. He reveals that she is Lady Jocelyn Leigh, a ward of the King. The King wanted her to marry my Lord Carnal, but she hated him, and so she ran away. And it’s hard to blame her, because my Lord Carnal isn’t very nice, and Captain Percy is, and clearly she will eventually fall in love with her husband. But first, adventures!

Many weeks of everyone pretending they don’t know very well that Ralph and Jocelyn are going to be sent back to England to have their marriage annulled culminate in the couple escaping in a tiny boat. They mean to go alone, but they end up with three additional passengers:

• Ralph’s servant Diccon, with whom he has an extremely prickly relationship owing to that one time when Diccon tried to kill him.
• Jeremy Sparrow, minister, former Shakespearean actor, and good-natured hulking giant, who has appointed himself Ralph’s new best friend.
• Somewhat inconveniently, my Lord Carnal.

Fortunately they manage to leave behind my Lord Carnal’s sidekick, an Italian doctor who is much given to a) lurking, and b) poisoning people.

Then: shipwreck, pirates, a makeshift courtroom scene, jail, lots of Indians, and an assortment of atmospheric descriptions of scenery.

There’s enough plot for, like, three different adventure novels here, but none of it feels gratuitous, or hastily tacked-on. Except perhaps the end. Ralph Percy really doesn’t like Indians.  And I like the characters, too. Jocelyn should be profoundly irritating, and sometimes she is, but in a human kind of way, rather than a tying herself into knots in order to obey the constraints of the story kind of way. And Ralph Percy is lovely and self-deprecating and heroic, and while Jeremy Sparrow comes out of nowhere and all of a sudden everyone is like, “Oh yeah, I remember seeing you in Twelfth Night,”, I don’t mind, because being a pious minister and a big, burly adventurer at the same time is tough, and he makes it work. I’m less enthused about the villains. My Lord Carnal is disappointingly one-sided, and I can’t really see the point of his creepy Italian poisoner sidekick. But I loved how they all — minus the creepy Italian poisoner — went off on piratey adventures together.

I started this book thinking it was going to be a miserable slog, but once I got a few chapters in, I couldn’t put it down. It’s nice to be able to agree with all of those book-buyers of 1900.

Read To Have and to Hold at Project Gutenberg.

Visit Melody’s blog, Redeeming Qualities for more vintage reviews and commentary!

The motoring novel is one of my favorite things about Edwardian popular fiction. By the mid-1910s, most wealthy families in books have cars, but if you go ten years beck, cars are something new and exciting, and if there’s a car in a book, it’s often pretty central. The books are still romance novels, or mystery novels, or adventure novels, but along with your romance, mystery or adventure, you get a healthy dose of snapped belts, empty fuel tanks, unreliable chauffeurs, and real and imaginary brands  of automobiles.

I haven’t found as many Edwardian motoring novels as I would like, but fortunately if I’m really wanting to read one, I can always turn to the Williamsons. Alice Muriel Williamson was a novelist, and her husband Charles Norris Williamson was an early automotive journalist,and together they wrote novels (she said “Charlie Williamson could do anything in the world except write stories” and “I can’t do anything else”). I’ve read, oh, eight or nine of them at this point, and while not every book contains all of the same elements, I can say pretty definitively that the Williamsons really liked cars, travel, alternating points of view, and people going incognito.

The Lightning Conductor, as far as I can tell, was the first novel they co-wrote — it’s from 1903 — and it contains all of the above. The story is a pretty familiar one: boy meets girl, boy disguises himself in order to get close to girl, boy and girl fall in love, girl discovers deception and boy has to come up with an excuse for being kind of an ass. This story is another thing the Williamsons really liked, judging by the number of times they used it, but they do it so nicely that it’s hard to care.

The girl and boy in question are Molly Randolph, the daughter of an immensely wealthy American businessman, and the Honourable Jack Winston, similarly wealthy but dissimilarly English. Soon after their arrival in England, Molly and her Aunt Mary meet a young man who convinces them that the best way to see Europe is from a car, and sells them his. And it’s 1903 or thereabouts, so even fictional cars break down every fifty miles, but this one is particularly terrible. It’s on one of the many occasions on which it is broken down that Jack Winston comes to Molly’s rescue, passing himself off as his own chauffeur and hiring his car out to her. People in Williamsons books are abnormally prone to disguising themselves as chauffeurs.

Everyone is impressed by Molly’s new chauffeur and his gentlemanly air and his ability to act as a tour guide at all the French chateaus they visit. At times they suspect him (in the guise of James Brown the chauffeur) of having murdered himself (in the guise of the Honourable John Winston), but his skill as a mechanicien makes up for a lot of things.

There are a bunch of moderately forgettable supporting characters, most of them show up for the big reveal at the end, and a lot of filler in the form of long descriptions of scenery — most Williamsons books are half travelogue — but the whole thing is exceedingly enjoyable, and a great introduction to the Williamsons, and to their peculiar sub-genre of early twentieth century romance/adventure.

Read The Lightning Conductor at the Internet Archive or at Google Books.

Visit Melody’s blog, Redeeming Qualities for more vintage reviews and commentary!

Dawn O’ Hara, The Girl Who Laughed is supposed to be equal parts tragic and funny, but somehow I don’t think Edna Ferber intended it to be both at the same time. Ferber is really good, in general, at making humor tragic, and that’s great. Authors who can’t make you take tragedy seriously are a lot easier to find, and a lot less worthy of respect.

I mean, I feel like probably giving the heroine a nervous breakdown/deathly illness and a lonely life as a reporter on a New York City newspapers is enough, you know? Does she really also need a tragic past involving a dashing, brilliant alcoholic who married her and then went insane? I say no. Edna Ferber says yes, but this is her first novel, so I guess we can give her a pass.

Dawn goes home to Wisconsin to recuperate. Her sister, Norah, and her brother-in-law, Max are happy to have her there, but she doesn’t want to depend on them. It’s not just about being as honorable and independent as every heroine must be — she has to earn money to keep her husband, Peter Orme, in the mental institution to which he’s become accustomed.

Dr. Ernst Von Gerhard, Max’s doctor friend and Dawn’s inevitable love interest (very German, sometimes semi-ironically described as a blond god), says that if Dawn goes back to her life in New York she’ll be dead within the year, so he finds her a job at a newspaper in Milwaukee.

Milwaukee is even more German than Von Gerhard. Dawn sees signs in the windows of stores that say, “English spoken here.” In German. This is one of many openings to talk about the German-ness of Milwaukee that Ferber does not let pass her by. Milwaukee, guys: it is so, so German.

Actually, that’s most of the middle of the book right there. That, and a lot about Dawn  and Von Gerhard heroically trying to supress their feelings for each other. And a sort of excellent bit about an Austrian woman pointing out to her husband that, since she has all the money in the marriage, not to mention all the class, he doesn’t get to tell her what to do. It reads a lot like one of Ferber’s short stories — in a good way, as opposed to a horrifically depressing way.

Things perk up a bit towards the end, when Von Gerhard starts trying to talk Dawn into divorcing the insane husband, which seems kind of low, especially coming from a blond god. She refuses, but probably kind of wishes she hadn’t, especially after she recieves word that Peter has recovered. Soon he shows up, all hollow-eyed and incalculable, and it quickly becomes obvious that his release from the mental hospital was a little premature.

I like Dawn O’Hara. No, really, I do. It’s just that Edna Ferber tends to be pretty unsentimental, and almost scornful of happy endings, and here she’s neither. And in some ways that’s a good thing. There’s nothing wrong with a happy ending, and it’s pretty enjoyable when a writer as good as Ferber wallows in sentiment, but only up to a point. I could only take so many pages of Dawn and Von Gerhard being stoic at each other before I began to hate them both. Dawn eventually won back my affection through the medium of her friendship with disreputable (and tragic) sports reporter Blackie. Von Gerhard…didn’t.

Read Dawn O’Hara at Project Gutenberg.

Visit Melody’s  blog, Redeeming Qualities.