The Genre We Inherited, The Woman We Forgot

There is a staircase in every haunted house, and it never leads anywhere good. But what if the staircase is circular, winding back on itself like a snake swallowing its own secrets? I came across Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Circular Staircase only recently, while working my way through one of those 'Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time' lists, half curiosity, half pilgrimage. What I expected was a dated curiosity, something dusty and overwritten, a historical artifact more than a living work. What I found, instead, was the foundation. Not just of a mystery, but of something stranger and more structurally daring. The blueprint, not for a murder, but for a genre.

Published in 1908, The Circular Staircase was Mary Roberts Rinehart’s first full-length novel, serialized originally in All-Story Magazine before being released in book form by Bobbs-Merrill. It tells the story of Rachel Innes, a sharp-tongued, middle-aged woman who rents a sprawling country home for the summer with her niece, Gertrude, and nephew, Halsey. Shortly after arriving, strange events escalate into a full-blown crisis: a man is murdered on the titular staircase, secrets from the house’s previous occupants surface, and Rachel finds herself both suspect and sleuth in a tangled web of deceit, family scandal, and hidden rooms.

A sensation upon release, the novel became one of the foundational texts of what would later be called the domestic thriller. Its success led Rinehart to adapt it into the stage play The Bat, a Broadway hit that left cultural fingerprints deep enough to inspire Batman himself. If that sounds implausible, dig deeper: the masked intruder, the secret passageways, the inheritance at risk, all the mythic architecture is already here.

Rinehart wrote The Circular Staircase at a time when American literature was caught between the grandiosity of post-Civil War realism and the lean experimentation of modernism. But she carved out a third path, one that spoke to readers in parlors and train cars, not salons or lecture halls. This was the age of serialized fiction, of dime novels, of narratives that moved fast and spoke plainly. But Rinehart elevated the form, infusing her work with humor, psychological insight, and a distinctly female voice.

Rachel Innes is not a detective. She’s not even an amateur sleuth in the modern sense. She’s a woman who has outlived her social usefulness (according to her time), childless, unmarried, wealthy enough to travel, but not enough to escape consequence. She is inconvenient and indispensable. And her presence at the center of the narrative is quietly revolutionary. Rachel’s characterization stands out not just for her assertiveness or humor, but for how fully she reflects the contradictions of her era, headstrong, occasionally bumbling, socially rigid, yet surprisingly self-aware. She reads as both authentic and anachronistic, grounded in a worldview that is at once insightful and troubling. Rinehart gave us a flawed protagonist, aging, underestimated, and utterly central.

The book was also a harbinger of the century to come. It predates Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Yet, it anticipates so much of what they would explore: class tension, unreliable narrators, hidden trauma, and the domestic space as battleground. And it does so while wielding a uniquely American skepticism toward institutions and appearances.

Rinehart’s style is often described as accessible, even chatty, but that undersells its subtlety. The brilliance of The Circular Staircase is that it feels like eavesdropping on a witty older aunt, one who’s far more observant than she lets on. The novel is written in the first person, with Rachel constantly commenting on her past ignorance: “Had I but known,” she repeats, almost as if it were a refrain. This narrative device has since been mocked (and even parodied), but in its original form, it works as a mechanism of dread. We know something terrible is coming, not because the narrator is omniscient, but because she’s fallible.

Rachel doesn’t gain insight in a flash of brilliance, but through humiliation, error, and persistence. She is constantly undercut by those around her, underestimated by men, lied to by family, and unsure of who she can trust. And yet she moves forward.

The novel’s physical setting, the house, is a maze of symbolism. There are locked rooms, secret staircases, false walls, and concealed passageways. The staircase itself is not just architecture; it is a metaphor for something more profound. Circular, recursive, disorienting. It becomes the spine of the story, a locus of dread and discovery. The narrative meanders, but never without purpose. Each twist is a layer of misdirection, not to manipulate the reader, but to mirror the confusion and fog of uncovering the truth.

Modern readers will, and should, wrestle with the novel’s depictions of class and race. The servant characters are drawn with limited dimensionality, and some of the language used (particularly regarding Liddy, the maid, and the butler) reflects early 20th-century racial and social attitudes that are jarring by contemporary standards. These elements do not negate the book’s literary value, but they complicate it. There’s a discomfort in the way the help are portrayed, but also a strange narrative honesty in Rachel’s own biases. Rinehart doesn’t give us a perfect protagonist; she gives us a woman of her era, negotiating her world through layers of class entitlement and limited perspective. That choice feels deliberate, even when it’s problematic.

Upon its release, The Circular Staircase was a phenomenon. It sold well, was adapted for the stage and screen, and led to Rinehart being hailed in later years as “the American Agatha Christie,” despite her work predating Christie's. However, time has a way of shaping legacies. Christie’s tighter plots and British elegance won the critical crown, while Rinehart’s sprawling, emotional, and domestically situated thrillers were treated as pulp, or worse, as women’s fiction.

But a reassessment is overdue. Rinehart’s influence can be seen in the DNA of nearly every psychological thriller that followed. From Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca to Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and more recently, in Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train or Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects, all owe a debt to the idea of the isolated woman in a house full of secrets.

And of course, there’s The Bat. That Rinehart’s 1920 play helped inspire the creation of Batman is not just trivia; it’s evidence of its enduring influence. Her narrative instincts didn’t just give birth to a genre; they helped create one of the most enduring pop culture icons of the 20th century.

Reading The Circular Staircase now is like excavating a foundation. You start with dust and wallpaper, and then you find steel beams underneath. The book is not perfect. Its plot is too convoluted, its clues too convenient, its language at times a relic of the worst assumptions of its age. But it also pulses with intelligence, humor, and conviction.

Rachel Innes is a prototype we still haven’t fully honored: an older woman protagonist, not wise because she’s mystical, but because she’s lived. She is scared, petty, brave, and relentless. That’s not content. That’s character.

Rinehart wasn’t just writing mysteries. She was writing space, mental and physical, where women could ask questions, break rules, and take up narrative room. That matters. That lingers. That’s what good culture does.

So here’s the image I can’t shake: a woman with a candle at the top of a staircase, listening. Not for ghosts. Not for answers. But for footsteps. For movement. For change.

She doesn’t run. She doesn’t scream. She waits.

Then she descends.

The culture moves fast. The staircase turns slowly. But if you follow it, floor by floor, step by step, you’ll find more than a body. You’ll find the bones of the genre, and the woman who lit the first match.

Staircase Image: © Shutterstock / Tim Berghman (used under license)

Photo: Mary Roberts Rinehart, circa 1914, by Theodore C. Marceau (public domain) via Wikimedia Commons