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The Curve of the Catenary

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 2 months ago

Rinehart, Mary Roberts - The Curve of the Catenary (1915)

 

Mary Roberts Rinehart produced a long novella, The Curve of the Catenary (1915), which is centered on scientific mystery. The ingenious story is one of Rinehart's few excursions into impossible crime, along with Haunted Lady (1942). It also has some strong left-wing criticism of social organization, with a depiction of the exploitation of the working class, and their appalling living conditions. This is quite unusual for the normally Republican Rinehart. The story also looks at the somewhat wild social life of the upper classes, which are beginning to resemble the Jazz Age to come, in the 1920's. In this it resembles the title story of Arthur B. Reeve's The Social Gangster (1915). Also, like "The Sixth Sense" (1915) in Reeve's collection, Rinehart's story offers a vivid look at the period in which American life was increasing bound up with the war raging in Europe, even though America was still neutral in the conflict.

 

Some of Rinehart's scientific mysteries, such as "Locked Doors", the late Miss Pinkerton novella "The Secret", and The Curve of the Catenary, share a common structural approach. In these, something strange and mysterious is going on - but what? The reader is challenged to figure out some underlying situation that is hidden from view. In these stories, the situation has a scientific basis. There are also non-scientific Rinehart puzzlers, such as The Circular Staircase and The Swimming Pool, which also center around hidden situations, although in these novels, the situations are not science-oriented. In all of these mysteries, the hidden situation is more important than who did the crime, or alibis or clues pointing to some culprit. There are also some hidden situations, less central, but still playing a role in their novel's plot mix, in such works as The Album and The Great Mistake.

 

This "hidden situation" approach has some consequences. One the one hand, the stories are built around genuine mysteries, with the reader constantly being challenged to figure out the mysterious situation behind the tale's events. On the other hand, it removes Rinehart from the type of mystery story practiced by Chesterton, Christie, Carr and Queen, in which individual suspects and their ability to commit a crime are paramount. This structural difference between Rinehart and more mainstream authors of detective fiction is at least as significant in defining Rinehart's approach, as are the Had I But Known aspects of Rinehart's writing.

 

The hidden situation also enables some unusual treatment of characters not found in other authors. Since many Rinehart books are built around a Big Secret, it is possible to define characters in terms of their relationship to the secret. Did they cause the secret situation? Did they learn about it, and are now trying to cover it up to protect someone? Have they discovered some secret clue to the hidden situation, and are now trying to track down the truth? Characters have all these sorts of secret knowledge of the hidden situation in Rinehart. The narrator soon realizes that the characters are concealing something - but what they are concealing does not come out till the end of the tale, or at least, the second half of the story.

 

The sole easily available source today of The Curve of the Catenary is a 1939 anthology, The Mystery Book. One suspects that Rinehart might have revised this version, from the original magazine appearance (which I have not seen).

 

Mike Grost

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