Rinehart, Mary Roberts - The Album (1933)

The Album (1933) is an uneven late Rinehart novel. The story lacks fair play, there are too many subplots, and it is way too long. The heroine wonders early on why the killer went to all the risk of committing a complex ax murder, while a simple shooting would have been much easier to pull off; this question is never answered. The ax murder does echo the ones in Rinehart's The Afterhouse (1913), and succeeds in being dramatic and emotionally effective. There are also many imaginative passages, and some good storytelling.

Miss Pinkerton often solves medical mysteries, and is related to the scientific detectives of the Reeve tradition. The man who actually solves the mystery in The Album is a scientific criminologist, complete with crime lab. He works closely with the police, but functions more often as an amateur investigator: he was brought in the case by a friend who was a suspect, he lives undercover at the scene of the crime as a servant, and does much of his sleuthing by snooping around, just like Rinehart's spinsters. He also has a romance with the narrator heroine of the novel. Truth serum is also used in one section of the book.

This sort of scientific detective is in the Reeve tradition. It also corresponds closely with the portrait of modern police scientific criminology in Anthony Abbot's About the Murder of Geraldine Foster (1930). The whole book, in fact, shows signs of influence from the Van Dine school, of which Abbot was a member. Rinehart sticks closely to the unraveling of the crime, just as in S.S. Van Dine. There are few suspense sequences, romance is fairly short, and the focus on the murder investigation rarely wavers. There are detailed floor plans, and an expert detective who works with the police: all features of the Van Dine school. There are also some mild "locked room" features, also popular with Van Dine. Rinehart looks like she has been trying to keep her writing style "up to date", absorbing features of the Van Dine school, without abandoning her own personality.

Rinehart repeatedly criticizes the way of old fashioned, isolated way of living of the five families in the book as abnormal, both socially and psychologically. She explicitly criticizes the fact the none of the women seem to have any life outside their houses. In a striking feminist passage, she compares this to a world in which "women were taking their places" in jobs and public life (Chapter 34).

Rinehart excels at her maps and floor plans. This is some of the most elaborate architecture in her books since The Circular Staircase. It is set forth, along with some good mystery writing, in Chapters 1 - 7, 13, 15, 18. The explanation of the killing in the last two chapters (48-49) is worked out in careful detail along the floor plan, and shows considerable imagination. The explanation of the theft in Chapters 33 - 36 has no architectural features, but it is a work of gripping storytelling none the less. The five houses in the tale are a bit elaborate, but only the left hand three have much significance. The murder house (No. 2) is the most important. The heroine's house next door (No. 3) is architecturally identical, a fact used by Rinehart to produce surrealist echoing effects. When the heroine introduces us to her bedroom, she describes it to us in terms of the parallel room at the murder house. The effect is very eerie, suggesting all sorts of hidden undercurrents in the heroine's life. Later, in the novella "The Burned Chair", Rinehart will introduce a pair of houses, to somewhat similar effect. All everyday living will take place in one house; all murder and mystery events take place in the similar house across the way. Going from one house to another means traveling from the normal world into the world of mystery. A somewhat similar architectural pattern is established in The Great Mistake (1940), where sinister events more often happen in a small building on the grounds called the "playhouse", rather than in the large central mansion where everybody lives.

Rinehart's architectural ideas show a 3D quality. The floor plans do not show that cliché of Golden Age layouts, the central hall with rooms on either side. Such a design is essentially one dimensional. Admittedly it is well suited to brownstone buildings, and shows up in such New York brownstones as Van Dine's The Kennel Murder Case, and Nero Wolfe's brownstone home. Rinehart instead has a building with both a hall and a perpendicular cross hall, one which uses two Cartesian coordinates to describe it. In addition, she has many floors for her houses; each has three regular floors, a roof, and a cellar. This gives a full 3 dimensions to her tales. Rinehart loves staircases, too, and often sets her works on them, including the murders in The Circular Staircase and The Bat. She shows people looking up or down levels of her buildings outside, through windows or up to the roof, spatially integrating the levels of her buildings. Rinehart also gives her buildings elaborate grounds, which will show up again in The Great Mistake.

One reason that Rinehart was able to adapt her fiction so well to the stage was that she was used to imagining with extreme precision the movements of her characters through her floor plans. When it came time to put her mystery fiction on stage in The Bat, she was able to integrate the precise staging required by the theater of her time with the floor plan movements of her characters demanded by the mystery. The two types of movement flow together in beautiful ways.

Mike Grost

Multiple murders (including one complete and one near decapitation) in an archaically and absurdly genteel residential crescent of five homes. Rather ridiculed by Julian Symons and praised by Dorothy L. Sayers, The Album struck me as having both its positives and its negatives. At times it seems like a mystery novel such as Edith Wharton might have written, with some wry, fascinating observation of social detail in this gentrified and ossified neighborhood. Yet the novel is much too long and the telling -- by a young (late twenties) "spinster" -- slow-moving and muddled. The solution moreover is convoluted and unconvincing. Mignon Eberhart constructed stronger mystery narratives, it seems to me, though the depth of social detail is lacking.

Curt