Mystery author # 5: Mary Roberts Rinehart

Here is my second classic mystery author. She wrote before, during and after the Golden Age of mystery fiction (the dates vary, but all agree that it covers the 1920s, 30s and 40s), and several of her books are still in print in spite of some rather harsh criticism of her work (to me an indicator that she probably had a formula that she overused). This, her second novel, is her most famous work and is considered to be one of her finest mysteries.

Title: The Circular Staircase
Year of publication: 1908
Availability: In print, copyright expired. Available for free online at Project Gutenberg
Pages: I read the e-book in Word, using the Geneva font. At 12 points it came to 201 pages. The Dover Mystery Classics paperback edition is 192 pages.
Setting and time: Eastern USA, contemporary to the writing
Type of mystery: Whodunit, country house mystery
Type of investigator: Amateur sleuth & a police detective
Some themes: Murder, fraud, embezzlement, superstition

The story (some may see SPOILERS):
When spinster Rachel Innes takes a house in the country for the summer, she expects to spend her time there in peace and quiet with her niece and nephew, Gertrude and Halsey. However, on the third night the son of the house owner breaks into the house and is shot dead by a mystery person. Halsey and Gertrude’s fiancé, Jack, had left the house in a hurry shortly before but there is only Gertrude’s word that they did. Naturally, suspicion falls on them, especially when Halsey fails to return home for some days and Jack is arrested on suspicion of having stolen security bonds from the bank he worked for and thus bankrupted the bank. After that, mystery keeps piling on top of mystery, until finally the case is solved with the co-operation of Rachel Innes and Detective Jamieson who is called in to investigate the murder.

Review: I encountered something unexpected here: an American country house mystery. I’m used to connecting the country house mystery to England and to authors like Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, perhaps because manors and country houses are such English phenomena. But of course there are country houses in the USA and no reason why there shouldn’t be American country house mysteries.
The storyteller heroine is an odd and entertaining character, contrary as an old hen, brave and scared by turns. There are many claustrophobic doings in the dark and deeds worthy of darkness, and endless twists. An experienced mystery reader will have puzzled together the solution to most of the mystery by mid-book, but it is still interesting to watch it unfold. The “had I but known” foreshadowing device which is used several times by the narrator (although never using those exact words) gets to be a bit annoying by the end, and as a matter of fact it is one of the things Rinehart has been most harshly criticised for.

Rating: A fine mystery in the best country house tradition. 4 stars.

Icelandic folk-tale: The Laughing Merman

Icelanders not only believed in the existence of selkies, but also in mer-people. The mermaids were said to be very beautiful, while the mermen were supposed to be ugly as sin but very wise and able to see things others did not. O nce upon a time a farmer went out fishing and pulled up a merman. He tried to get the merman to talk to him but he would not answer, except to beg him to release him back into the sea, but this the farmer refused to do. The farmer rowed back to land, taking the captive merman with him. When he pulled up the boat on the shore, his wife came to him and greeted him with tenderness and kisses, which he received with pleasure. This made the merman laugh. Then the man’s dog came to him and greeted him tenderly in the way of dogs, by jumping up to him, but the farmer hit the dog. Again the merman laughed. Then the farmer walked up towards his house, but on the way he tripped over a tussock and hurt himself. He got angry and gave the tussock a good kicking. Then...

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove...

Reading in Reykjavík

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