Quite why I’ve never read a novel by Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958) before is a mystery to me. Probably the best known of the ‘American Agatha Christies’, she is much cited, but beyond her first novel, The Circular Staircase (1908), and the later, much-adapted The Bat (1926), her work specifically is rarely discussed.
Rinehart is famous for the ‘Had I But Known’ style of writing, where a narrator notes that things could have played out differently had they taken a different course of action, thus creating suspense. She is also often credited – presumably wrongly – with spawning the ‘butler did it’ cliché.
That was all I knew when I picked up The Man in Lower Ten (1909), the only Rinehart novel I own in physical form. Mine is a 1960s Dell paperback, partly chewed by rats, which came into my possession mysteriously. My parents, who were antiquarian book dealers, one day accidentally mixed up a load of old stock they were throwing away with some of my cherished books that were in storage, and Mum kindly put all the crimey-looking titles aside for me, assuming they were mine.
Recently, faced with a nasty bout of Coronavirus (again! And worse!)*, it felt like time to read a Rinehart, so read a Rinehart I did.
The story here is, fascinatingly, halfway between late-nineteenth-century post-sensationalism and Golden Age detective fiction. That’s not unexpected but, as a scholar of literature, it’s fascinating to see it in action. For example, while there are some chases, sinister villains, and blemishless damsels, there is also psychology, camaraderie, and comedy. I was particularly struck by the narrator/hero, who is clearly supposed to be an everyman.
Lawrence Blakeley, our hero, is a mid-ranking solicitor riding a sleeper train to deliver some key documents in a fraud case. After the first night on board, he wakes up without the documents …. And without his clothes … and in the wrong compartment. He has, for the night, switched identities with an unknown man and when he approaches what should be his bed, he finds a man – murdered!
While Blakeley looks like the prime suspect, the train promptly crashes, with few survivors, putting the murder on the back-burner, but Blakeley is keen to recover his luggage and uncover the truth. He also needs to know how and why all signs of guilt seem to point to a beautiful woman he positively cannot allow himself to fall in love with (spoiler: he falls in love with her).
I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, not so much a mystery as a thriller with clues and deductions, and kept double checking the publication date because it felt so much more 1920s than 1900s. Even small phrases – ‘amateur detective’ and ‘mental state’ – were more modern than I’d expected and must have been pretty bang up-to-date. There is also a parody of the eccentric amateur sleuth: Mr Wilson Budd Hotchkiss, a fussy little man who declares himself a crime-solver having immersed himself in the works of Poe and Gaboriau and in their characters’ methods of detection.
Oh! And I learnt new slang. At one point, a character describes the murder as ‘a regular ten-twent’-thirt’ crime’. This set me googling, and it turns out (perhaps everyone else already knew this) that ‘ten-twenty-thirty’ or ‘ten-twent-thirt’ is slang, which Merriam-Webster defines as ‘a cheap and typically melodramatic theatrical entertainment’. Now I know!
I saw ‘cinema’ used for the first time I’ve noticed to mean a portion at the end of a music hall performance where a short film is shown. So, one wouldn’t go to the cinema but to the music hall where one would experience the cinema after the comedy or the dancing. That’s one of the things I love about reading popular fiction from previous times: the use of language, when it mimics speech.
The edition I have is illustrated throughout. I don’t know how normal this is for Dell paperbacks. I know that the first edition of The Man in Lower Ten was illustrated but from a Google search, the illustrations look different. Some are quite atmospheric, most are a bit silly, and the illustration that accompanies ‘“You will have to rouse yourself,” the girl said desperately’ is unfortunate. I’ll show myself out.
The Man in Lower Ten was a good read and I look forward to reading more from this author. Luckily, she has a hefty oeuvre to pick from.
* If you're wondering, I caught COVID-19 first in January (the review for Four Days' Wonder mentioning it was posted a month later) and again last week, in March. I am still testing positive and do not recommend!
