I still don’t love them but I find myself a lot more forgiving of the things that would usually annoy me in books like these.Īnd oh boy, are there a lot of them! The Circular Staircase was published in 1908, and reading it in 2020 means some parts are a little more uncomfortable.
This was Rinehart’s signature style, and her narrator, Rachel, is both engaging and self-deprecating enough that all these comments feel as though they suit Rachel’s voice and that slight ironic detachment she has towards the events of the novel. Here, I’m a little less annoyed than I usually would be. You don’t need to foreshadow that quite so conspicuously I promise, I’ve never once picked up a murder mystery and been shocked to discover that it contains a murder.
I’m smart enough to conclude that sooner or later, someone in this house is gonna wind up dead. It’s not a device I love in mysteries – generally, I think it’s a little clumsy and much too ‘on the nose’ as it were, because as readers we already know that something bad is going to happen. Rachel Innes, our amateur sleuth, is the charming and opinionated narrator of The Circular Staircase, one of the ‘had I but known’ style mysteries – you know, the sort where the narrator is constantly making a little aside to the reader to indicate that something tragic would go on to happen soon after this moment, and of course they didn’t realise that at the time – but oh, with hindsight, how terrible that would prove to be! – without actually telling you what the thing is, until it happens. “This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind, deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies happy and prosperous.” #TBRChallenge hosted by Wendy The Misadventures of Super Librarian
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