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Nine short stories from one of the nation's finest mystery authors When her husband demands a divorce, a young wife heads to Reno alone, leaving the baby with her husband and his new beloved, betting that a week trapped between his child and his mistress will make her hubby yearn for her return. By the sea, a hairdresser gets into mischief over a star sports fisherman. And in a city threatened by conflict, a World War I veteran tries to make himself useful by enforcing the blackout. These are just a few of the scenes from the short fiction of Mary Roberts Rinehart, who in these nine brief tales shows why she was one of the nation's most popular authors for so many decades. Though famous as a mystery writer, Rinehart is just as much at home writing drama, or taking a witty look at the lighter side of law and order. More than a century since she published her first story, Rinehart's prose remains as sharp as an assassin's blade.
Mary Roberts Rinehart
Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958) was one of the United States’s most popular early mystery authors. Born in Pittsburgh to a clerk at a sewing machine agency, Rinehart trained as a nurse and married a doctor after her graduation from nursing school. She wrote fiction in her spare time until a stock market crash sent her and her young husband into debt, forcing her to lean on her writing to pay the bills. Her first two novels, The Circular Staircase (1908) and The Man in Lower Ten (1909), established her as a bright young talent, and it wasn’t long before she was one of the nation’s most popular mystery novelists. Among her dozens of novels are The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry (1911), which began a six-book series, and The Bat (originally published in 1920 as a play), which was among the inspirations for Bob Kane’s Batman. Credited with inventing the phrase “The butler did it,” Rinehart is often called an American Agatha Christie, even though she began writing much earlier than Christie, and was much more popular during her heyday.
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