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There have been a lot of articles and blog posts floating around lately about what to read if you’re into Downton Abbey. One in particular, which talked about Elizabeth von Arnim apropos of one character giving a copy of Elizabeth and Her German Garden to another, made Evangeline at Edwardian Promenade say, “hey, what about Elinor Glyn?” Which, obviously, is the correct response to everything. And then I read it, and thought, “yeah, Elizabeth and her German Garden was popular when it came out in 1898, but would people really be trying to get each other to read a fifteen rear-old(ish) novel by a German author during World War I?” And then we decided that we could probably come up with an excellent list of Edwardian and World War I-era fiction that tied in the Downton Abbey. And so we did.

It’s a pretty casual list, mostly composed of things we came up with off the tops of out heads, a bit of research on Evangeline’s part and a bit of flipping through advertisements on mine, so we’re making no claims to be exhaustive. If you have suggestions for additions to the list, leave a comment.

The Amazing Interlude is my new favorite World War I romance. I’m not sure I had one before, but whatever. Mary Roberts Rinehart is, as usual, great, and she has the added advantage of having made a trip over to Europe to check out the trenches and stuff, so she knows what she’s talking about. Not that The Amazing Interlude is as gruesome, serious and propagand-filled as Kings, Queens and Pawns, her account of what she saw at the front, but it doesn’t need to be. It’s light fiction with a high moral purpose, and as such it functions perfectly.

Sara Lee Kennedy, the heroine, lives in Pennsylvania with her aunt and her uncle. It’s the early days of the war, and most Americans are only vaguely concerned with it, but the more Sara Lee thinks about it, the more she feels that she needs to go over to Europe and do something to help, except that she’s not a nurse and she doesn’t know how she can be useful. After her uncle dies, Sara Lee’s fiancé, Harvey, wants to get married immediately — her aunt is moving in with a cousin, and Sara Lee needs to live somewhere. Harvey thinks that the war isn’t their concern, and that her interest in it is silly. The members of the Methodist Ladies’ Aid Society, on the other hand, are more like Sara Lee — they all feel a bit guilty that they’re not doing more to help. And that’s how Sara Lee convinces them to allow her a hundred dollars a month to go to Belgium and run a soup kitchen for soldiers at the front.

Harvey tells her she can’t go, but she replies that she was telling him what she was going to do, not asking for his input. It’s pretty awesome.

Once she’s in London, Sara Lee realizes that getting to the front is going to be a lot more complicated than she expected, and that every person in a position to give her an appropriate visa is also obligated to suspect her of being a spy. But she makes friends, first with an Englishman whose son is a soldier, and then with Henri, a Belgian spy. Henri is great. I mean, he’s got all the expected things covered: he’s massively brave, he falls in love with Sara Lee at the drop of a hat (or, more precisely, a donkey), he’s involved in a deeply homoromantic relationship with his chauffeur, etc. But he’s also kind of a nervous wreck. It’s very endearing.

Henri sneaks Sara Lee into France, and then he and his best friend/chauffeur Jean install her in a partially bombed-out house a quarter of a mile behind the Belgian front line. They find her a maid, Marie, and a guard, Rene, and the three of them set up their soup kitchen. Henri and Jean secretly subsidize it, and Henri teaches Sara Lee how to deal with the soldiers’ more minor injuries, and the house becomes very popular and even a little famous, to the point that Sara Lee receives a medal from the King of Belgium. Meanwhile, she keeps writing letters to the Methodist Ladies, who are satisfied with the results of their investment, and to Harvey, who is less happy. His letters a) belittle her efforts, b) try to make her feel guilty about leaving him, and c) show him to be a selfish, small-minded person. And while Sara Lee is being faithful to him and trying to convince herself that she’s still in love with him, he’s going to the Methodist Ladies behind her back to try and get them to cut off her allowance.

And eventually he succeeds, and Sara Lee’s “amazing interlude” is over.

Harvey is really a piece of work. Every time he appeared, he raised another red flag. My personal favorite bit of Harvey-behavior was when, after Sara Lee’s return, some reporters asked him if it was true that she’d been decorated by the King of Belgium, to which he responds that he doesn’t know, doesn’t care, and what did they think she was doing, fighting? Also, Sar

February’s Edwardian Promenade guest post is on Mary Roberts Rinehart’s first mystery novel, The Man in Lower Ten. This is partly because I reread it when I was on that train murder kick earlier this month, and partly because I was just reading a (nonfiction) book in which Rinehart was continually being compared to Mary Higgins Clark, which seemed somewhat unfair.

For the first time, I have a real problem with Mary Roberts Rinehart. It has to do with her spelling.

No one really wants to read a book that’s misspelled all the way through. I mean, if you’re Daisy Ashford and you’re, like, eight, it’s excusable. But basically, unless you’re Russell Hoban, misspelling an entire book is don’t-try-this-at-home territory. And while Bab: a Sub-Deb is cute, Rinehart just…isn’t Russell Hoban, you know? Read at your own risk.

People who have been reading this blog for a while can probably tell what my favorite things are: secret insane wives, ridiculously melodramatic situations written well, fictional famous people, rounded and sympathetic secondary characters, spontaneous human combustion, etc.

At this point, I believe Mary Roberts Rinehart can do pretty much anything. In the past week, I have read works by her including humorous short stories, serious short stories, a mystery novel, a funny novel, and a serious novel, and they were all thoroughly enjoyable.

K was the serious novel. It does not include spontaneous human combustion.

The book gets it’s name from the central character — he goes by K. Le Moyne, and it’s obvious from the first that it’s an assumed name, but he can’t think of any first names he likes that begin with K, so everyone just calls him by the initial — but really it’s about the Street, a lower middle class neighborhood where most of the characters live.

Sidney Page lives in a house on the Street with her invalidish mother, Anna, and Anna’s spinster sister Harriet Kennedy. The book begins when they take in K. as a lodger. Soon after, Harriet moves out and becomes a fashionable dressmaker. Then Sidney decides to become a nurse, and leaves the house in K.’s care while she takes up residence at the hospital.

Other occupants of the street include:

• Joe Drummond. He’s in love with Sidney and doesn’t react well when she decides she’d rather become a trained nurse than marry him. He, um, shoots someone.
• Mrs. McKee, who serves meals to other peoples’ lodgers (including K.) and eventually marries a deaf and dumb book agent.
• Tillie, Mrs. McKee’s waitress. She’s where the secret insane wife comes in: her gentleman friend, Mr. Schwitter, has one. He’s not a bad guy, really, and he’s told Tillie all about the wife. She eventually agrees to fake-marry him, which seems alternately like a good choice and a bad one.
• Christine Lorenz, a friend of Sidney’s who marries a man named Palmer Howe, who turns out to be kind of an ass. The move into the first floor apartment in Sidney’s house, and Christine and K. become close friends, while Palmer takes up with his former mistress and crashes his car.
• Drs. Ed and Max Wilson — Ed is the elder brother, a GP, who has sacrificed a lot to give Max every possible advantage, and Max is the younger brother who isn’t quite worth it. I mean, he’s a brilliant surgeon and all, but he’s the kind of guy who pursues a lot of women without giving any thought to what kind of effect that will have on them. And he’s devastatingly attractive, and there are rules about fraternization between doctors and nurses. He likes Sidney, and she likes him.
• The Rosenfelds, who represent the lower end of the class spectrum. Mrs. Rosenfeld takes in ironing, or something. Johnny is Palmer Howes’ chauffeur, and when Palmer overturns his car, Johnny is the one who ends up in the hospital. Mr. Rosenfeld is a deadbeat, and K. helps the rest of the family send him to the poorhouse, which is apparently a good thing.
• Reginald, a squirrel.

The only significant character who doesn’t live on the Street is Carlotta Harrison, who is many things: half-Spanish, Dr. Max’s lover, a trainee nurse, a person with knowledge of K.’s past, and moderately evil. She doesn’t like Sidney very much.

So, stuff happens. Lots of stuff. The shooting, the car crash, Tillie’s bastard child, the bit where Carlotta Harrison switches the labels on a couple of medicine bottles so that Sidney will give Johnny Rosenfeld the wrong medicine, the slightly anticlimactic r

Circumstances conspired to make me compare The House of a Thousand Candles to The Circular Staircase. First, I started reading them at the same time–the Rinehart on my Kindle, the Nicholson on my phone. Then, when I googled Meredith Nicholson, I came up with an article on Michael Grost’s Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection that explicitly compared the two. So most of the time that I was reading the Nicholson book, I was thinking about Rinehart. And I was expecting Nicholson to compare pretty badly.

The thing I’ve always said about Mary Roberts Rinehart–at least to myself–is that her best quality is her sense of humor. And apparently Rinehart agreed, saying that the problem with her competitors was a lack of humor. Mike Grost offers The House of a Thousand Candles as an example of those humorless competitors, but I think he’s being a little unfair. I can think of much worse offenders. Anna Katherine Green, for one. But because of Grost’s piece, I was expecting House of a Thousand Candles to be pretty bad, so I ended up being pleasantly surprised–and that’s not a bad thing to be.

Our hero is John Glenarm, and in a lot of ways he’s typical of mstery/adventure novels from this era–sort of in the Grenfell Lorry mode, you know? Upper middle class, trained to a profession, brave and honorable and equally at home in a gunfight or a lady’s parlor. Unlike Lorry, though, Jack Glenarm does not appear to think that the world revolves around him. This is, to say the least, a quality I value in narrators. Jack is mostly pretty likeable, actually. And I love his relationship with his dead grandfather–how determined Jack is to carry out his wishes, and how Nicholson shows us how much alike they are without making Jack conscious of it. Too often first-person narration only tells you things that the narrator is aware of, but Nicholson has been cleverer than that.

Jack’s profession is engineering, and this story would not be taking place at all if he had chosen architecture instead. His grandfather, John Marshall Glenarm, is a little bit obsessed with architecture–and by a little, I mean a lot–and wanted Jack to study it too, but Jack decided to travel around the world with his disreputable friend Larry Donovan and burn through the fortune his father left him instead. That takes him about three years.

Then he gets a notification from Arthur Pickering, his grandfather’s lawyer/protege, who Jack has detested since they were at school together: John Marshall Glenarm is dead, and while Jack has inherited his property, there are some conditions attached. The main one is that Jack must go to Annandale, his grandfather’s half-finished estate in Indiana, and stay there for a year. Otherwise the property goes to Marian Devereaux, the niece of the Protestant nun who runs a girls’ school on an adjacent piece of land. One of the other conditions is that Jack can’t marry her. And one more thing: John Marshall Glenarm’s estate is considerable poorer than expected, and Jack suspects Pickering of some kind of wrongdoing. So does Larry, who appears unexpectedly in New York, on the run from the law after, I don’t know, killing somebody in Ireland, I think.

Annandale is pretty weird. Half the rooms aren’t habitable, but there’s a gigantic library full of books on architecture, and it’s lit entirely by candles. Also a dungeon, which John Marshall Glenarm’s servant, Bates, uses to store potatoes.

Bates is also

So, um, bear with me here. This was written and posted entirely from my phone, and I’m having some trouble italicizing things, so I’ve decided…not to. I will fix it later, I promise. And I’ll add more links, too. And that thing that places most of the post behind a cut tag.

I decided after my second Mary Roberts Rinehart book that I was a fan, and The Circular Staircase is, I think, my fifth. It might be the first one I read about, though, because MRR is remembered primarily as the originator of the Had-I-But-Known school of mystery fiction, and The Circular Staircase is the prime example.
Had-I-But-Known mysteries are the ones with first person narrators who are constantly saying things like “I would never have gone if I knew then what I know now,” and “this would prove to be important later” and other irritating things along the same lines–things that are apt to make readers who are caught up in the story…un-catch. Please, someone, give me a better way to phrase that. Anyway, it’s a style I wouldn’t want to encounter in the hands of any author with less of a sense of humor than MRR. She mostly makes it work, but I don’t think many others could.
And this isn’t Rinehart’s best work. The main character, Rachel Innes, is engaging despite her tendency to spout had-I-but-known-ish phrases, but she’s overwhelmed by clutter.
Rachel is a spinster who has had custody of her orphaned niece and nephew since they were children. Halsey and Gertrude are now 20 and 24, respectively, and they’ve talked their aunt into renting a house in the country for the summer. The first night Rachel is there, the is a mysterious tresspasser and something falls down the stairs in the middle of the night. The second, after Halsey and Gertrude have arrived, there is a murder, and Halsey and the friend he’s brought to stay disappear. Halsey returns a few days later, without his friend and without an explanation, but by then half a dozen other crazy things have happened, and all you can do is try to take them all in and hope they make sense eventually.
I couldn’t synopsize this book in less than fifty pages, but here are some things that happen: Rachel finds some cufflinks. The butler dies of fright. Some plates are broken. The housekeeper gets blood poisoning. A child does not know where he lives. The stable burns down. Halsey turns out to be engaged to the murdered man’s sister. Shaving off a moustache turns out to be an astonishingly effective disguise. Also there’s a secret room and a midnight visit to a graveyard, two things that always make me think of A Woman Named Smith.
And, okay, filling a book with mysterious events that have no clear connection to each other is a fairly effective way of writing a mystery. But it also makes the bit at the end where everything is explained go on for far, far too long. Again, it’s okay because it’s Mary Roberts Rinehart, but I’d prefer a book where I didn’t have to make excuses for her.
I don’t have to make excuses for Rachel, though. She’s great. Rinehart’s protagonists always are–sensible and practical and brave and stubborn and mostly able to see the funny side of things. The cool thing about Rachel in particular is her relationship with the detective, Mr. Jamieson. We don’t get to see as much of it as I’d like, but what there is is intriguing. He obviously picks her out from the beginning as the most sensible and trustworthy person around, even though he knows she’s not telling him everything. And Rachel trusts him, too, although in a less obvious way. She avoids telling him things that she believes incriminate Halsey and Gertrude, but she relies on him quite a bit. I think she knows that Jamieson is going to get it right in the end, although as it turns out, he needs a bit of help from her first. My favorite bit is when, after the inquest, she invites

I’ve spent some time lately looking at lists of bestsellers from the early twentieth century. I probably won’t ever read all of these books, but the list seems like a good source of recommendations. And Project Gutenberg, as it turns out, has the list handily formatted with links to the available etexts. So here’s that, [...]