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...