The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories

MARY ROBERTS RINEHART (1876-1958)

Mary Roberts Rinehart's early life, though painful, could hardly have been better devised to produce the sort of writer she turned out to be. When she was nine, her father killed himself after failing as a salesman. Her mother took boarders into their Pittsburgh home to make ends meet.

Young Rinehart began writing for her school paper and entering stories in Pittsburgh Press contests. She earned a nursing degree, worked on the hospital wards that dealt with the blue-collar and bar-fight traffic, married a doctor, bore three sons, and did not return to writing until she was thirty. Within three years, her second book, «The Man in Lower Ten,» became the first detective novel to become a national best-seller in the United States. In the wake of this phenomenal success, she accompanied her husband to Europe, where he studied his specialty. She applied her writing skills to articles about politics and medicine, became a war correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post, used her nursing credentials to avoid the military ban on reporters at the front, and won herself a second national reputation.

Home again after the war, she wrote ten more best-sellers, numerous other books, articles and short stories for the big-circulation 'slicks,' and two smash-hit plays. In addition, she found time to take part in the woman-suffrage movement and to spread public awareness of breast cancer.

Rinehart changed the course of American detective fiction by infusing into the puzzle the personal details that produce in readers a strong identification with the heroine, thereby causing them to share her fear, bafflement, and final triumph.

Despite its brevity, «The Lipstick» provides a look at the usual characteristics of Rinehart's stories. The narrator is a self-reliant young woman whose eye for domestic detail (the lipstick) leads to the solution of the crime. Rinehart uses a bit of romance, a touch of humour, about as much development of minor characters as was typical of the genre in her day, and an adversarial relationship between the heroine and the police. This short form doesn't sustain a device that Rinehart popularised in her novels-maintaining suspense by keeping the plucky heroine in constant jeopardy. Critics called this the 'Had I But Known' tactic, and scoffed at it. But it worked.