Review: THE GREAT MISTAKE by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Patricia Abbott is the social secretary to Mrs. Maud Wrainwright, the mistress of a huge mansion called the Cloisters because a good portion of it is a medieval monastery, shipped stone-by-stone from Europe to the idyllic hill overlooking the small town of Beverly. Pat likes her employer and her job, but a pall is cast over the Cloisters when a series of attacks and murders take place in the estate's ominously-named Playhouse. Will Pat and her friends from Beverly be able to discover who the murderer is, or will an innocent person go to jail?

As long-time readers of this blog know, I'm a fan of Mary Roberts Rinehart, the so-called American Agatha Christie (I somewhat disagree with that statement, but if it inspires other people to read her books, I'm good with it). The Great Mistake reminded me of another book of Rinehart's, The Swimming Pool—not just because the covers look similar, but because three quarters of the people who are attacked in this novel wind up either in or next to a swimming pool. I'm going to guess "the great mistake" was installing a pool. Never put in a pool! That way murder lies.

The Great Mistake also deals with similar themes to The Swimming Pool: wealth, the precariousness of the American dream, and so on. It's less successful than The Swimming Pool at fleshing those themes out, but I do think The Great Mistake is much better than The Swimming Pool at telling a good story with sympathetic characters.

The beginning of The Great Mistake immediately sucked me in. I loved Pat and how she definitely had people she liked and people she didn't. I also loved the chemistry between her and Tony Wrainwright, Maud's son. He's definitely charming, whereas Pat isn't, and it takes her a while to warm up to him. And then his wife shows up. Dun-dun-dun!

The mystery was also very complicated and difficult to figure out. For most of the novel I thought this was a good thing. But after the attack on Maud, I felt like it was time things started wrapping up. They didn't; there was a good 100 pages to go and people STILL kept being attacked. It was annoying because these attacks didn't further the plot of the book at all, nor did they provide me clues as to who the murderer was. Keeping readers in the dark is all well and good, but at some point one does need a collection of viable suspects. Even after the detective explained how he figured out who the killer was, Rinehart STILL kept the name of the murderer from us. I was like, "JUST TELL ME WHO THE FUCKING MURDERER IS ALREADY!" Seriously, I said that aloud, while banging the book against my forehead. I was THAT annoyed. If this novel had had a neck I would have strangled it.

The Great Mistake also employs a strange narrative device where Pat describes scenes to the reader as if she witnessed them personally, when she didn't (it's written in the first person, from Pat's point of view). I didn't hate the device, but it was a little odd, and it stretched the story out by a good third or maybe even a half. I don't need to sit in on every freaking conversation the police have, you feel me? If Rinehart wanted to include scenes that didn't involve Pat, why write The Great Mistake in the first person? It was just odd.

Because of the ending, my feelings toward The Great Mistake are mixed. I loved the first half and all the drama between Tony, his wife, Pat, and the other drama going on in Beverly. But by the second half neither Tony nor Maud do very much except panic because another person's dead in the Playhouse, which made them pretty boring; and the final quarter tried my patience to the nth degree (not that that's very difficult to do). There was a point where Rinehart just really needed to stop and wrap things up, and she went way beyond that point. That being said, Pat was a great character, and for the most part it was good mystery. Overall I think The Great Mistake was an okay read, but it's a bummer how a terrible ending can completely alter one's opinion of a novel.



Discus this post with me on Twitter, FaceBook, Google+ or in the comments below.

BBAW: The Best Books You've (Probably) Never Read

Today for Book Blogger Appreciation Week, we're pimping out books we read this year that need more buzz. As some of you might know, I also have a classics blog called The Project Gutenberg Project, where I've reviewed a lot of terrible books. But also some really great ones! One of my favorite books of the entire year is The Man In Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart. Basically, someone is murdered on a train, and a lawyer named Lawrence Blakely is accused of the crime. Since he's innocent, he has to find out who really did it and clear his own name.

A few snippets of reviews:

Reading this has made me remember what a good story-teller [Mary Roberts Rinehart] was. In spite of a lot of dated elements, the story has such a contemporary feel that I kept forgetting it was written over a hundred years ago. Definitely a fun read. --A Little Reading

As in The Circular Staircase, you’re given a lot of clues, but in The Man in Lower Ten, they mostly come at the beginning. and instead of the chaos spawning more chaos, it’s slowly put into order. Also, it’s a train murder story — and there’s something about those that always gets me — but not just a train murder story. Actually, it might be the first train murder story.... --Melody at Edwardian Promenade

I especially recommend The Man in Lower Ten (1909), with its Hitchcockian plot of a bored, staid lawyer who becomes immeshed [sic] in murder on a train and a particularly hilarious take on the amateur sleuth. --The Bunburyist

I agree with all of these statements. The Man In Lower Ten is a great, entertaining mystery that reminded me of a Hitchcock movie and feels surprisingly modern. Rinehart has a tendency to overdo it with the plot, but with The Man In Lower Ten that's less bothersome because the mystery is pretty much established at the beginning and the rest of the novel is about Lawrence and his best friend, Richie, getting into some hilarious scrapes. For more details, you can see my review at PGP.



I'm also just a tiny bit obsessed with Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini right now. I think I'm getting it under control, though--I only mention this book two or three times a day. Scaramouche is a coming-of-age revenge tale set during the French Revolution. How can you possibly dislike that? If someone (for whatever reason--work with me here) came along and was like, "There's an opportunity to live in this book called Scaramouche; interested?" I'd be like, "FUCKYEAHSCARAMOUCHE!"

Anyway. A few snippets from other bloggers:

From the wonderful opening line of this 1921 novel by Rafael Sabatini (“He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad”) I could tell I was going to love Scaramouche! And I did – it’s one of the best books I’ve read so far this year. --She Reads Novels

At their best, Sabatini’s books are full of snarky gentleman heroes, beautiful, boyish, ridiculously gullible girls, and lots of swashbuckling. And Scaramouche is definitely one of his best. --Redeeming Qualities

[Sabatini]'s an author that deserves to be re-discovered. --Alex at Project Gutenberg Project

There aren't a lot of reviews of Scaramouche around, and I think that's because it's a very difficult book to review--I know I struggled with it, at least. The novel feels very straightforward while you're reading it, but once you finish you realize how complex it is and how little you can write about without spoiling the story. Suffice it to say, Scaramouche has everything you could ever possibly want in a novel. EVER. Including a kick-ass opening sentence that sets up the rest of the story perfectly. For more details, check out my review at PGP.

And hey, did you know you can get both of these books for free? Even the audiobooks? That's because they're SO OLD no one wants to read them anymore. But they should be read, because they're awesome.

Review: THE SWIMMING POOL by Mary Roberts Rinehart

THE POOL, THE OMINOUS POOL. In 1950s New York, Lois lives in genteel poverty with her brother in the dilapidated remnants of their parents' country mansion. Then her spoiled, wealthy, and glamorous sister, Judith, divorces her husband and decides to move in with them. All of the siblings think this a TERRIBLE idea, but naturally Lois agrees because it wouldn't be much of a book if she didn't. Soon their house is being broken into nearly every night, there's an entire battalion of lurkers in the bushes, the sketchy guy renting their cottage starts hitting on Lois, people can't step outside without being shot at, and there's a dead woman in the pool. Trouble follows Judith around like a bad cold. The only question is, when the heck is she going to move out?? (I kid, the real question is who killed the woman. Kind of.)

I really enjoyed the first part of The Swimming Pool. It's set up as a sins-of-the-fathers tale from the beginning, what with Lois and Phil living in the grand ruins of an American dream gone wrong, and the story of their father's suicide after the stock market crash in 1929 clearly having something to do with the current mystery--although exactly what isn't hashed out until the very end. I also thought Judith, while THE MOST ANNOYING CHARACTER IN THE WORLD, was interesting and fun to read about in a Norma Desmond kind of way. The tone of The Swimming Pool is also somewhat similar to Sunset Boulevard, in that it's a mixture of Gothic, tragedy, and humor; and I thought all those elements worked well together.

That being said, The Swimming Pool started to annoy me near the end. There were just too many break-ins and shootings happening without any advancement of the plot; and there were only so many times I wanted to hear Judith being questioned when it was obvious she wasn't going to say anything. If only she had been killed in the first half, it would have served the same purpose! Honestly, I expected Judith to die, since Mary Roberts Rinehart sets us up to hate her guts; but instead she gets a kind of pseudo-redemption that I found more annoying than anything else.

I don't want to slam this book completely, since I do think there were some big ideas and themes Rinehart was shooting for concerning entitlement, the nature of American success, and feminine beauty; but those themes are lost in the repetition of yet another break-in, yet another incident where Judith lies, and so on. If I took a shot every time a character mentioned the fifty thousand dollars Lois' mother received, I'd need a liver transplant. "Fifty thousand dollars!" "Fifty thousand." "Gee, fifty thousand." *FACEWALL*

Honestly, I don't think I can recommend The Swimming Pool, although I wish I could. It just goes on for way too long, and by the end I felt like I'd been chewing my own arm off to escape a trap and had lost the will to live (not to be overly dramatic or anything). You should read The Man In Lower Ten (review here) or The After House (review here), instead.

The Wrong Clothes, the Wrong Man?

If you've been reading this blog for a while, you probably know I obsess a bit when it comes to clothing in books. But a few books ago (who needs to tell time in actual days?), I encountered a Fictional Clothing Situation that threw me a little.

In The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart, the main character, Lawrence, meets a woman under unusual circumstances and falls in love with her. Sounds pretty normal, right? But whenever he sees her for most of the book, he's wearing someone else's clothes. Just in case you don't notice it on your own, the character helpfully points it out us: "I don't want to meet you like other people, and I suppose you always think of me as wearing the other fellow's clothes."

Usually when characters wear another's clothing, it's to spoof gender or social norms. Think of something like The Prince and Pauper, for example, or Some Like It Hot. I don't think that's the purpose here, however. In fact, I'm not sure what exactly the clothing mix-up signifies.

Part of the purpose is probably to underscore The Wrong Man storyline, as Lawrence is mistaken for a man named Sullivan, who stole all his clothes and luggage and left Lawrence with his own. Once he puts on Sullivan's clothes, no one believes he's NOT Sullivan--except for Alison, who clearly knows the real Sullivan but won't say so.

That's just one instance where Lawrence wears another's clothes, however. In the second case, he stalks Alison to a weekend party and has to borrow another guy's dinner suit (or bathing suit--I was a little unclear on this point. I hope it was the dinner suit). In this instance, he's not really mistaken for another man, and it's connected solely with his pursuit of Alison.

So what does it mean when a suitor is constantly wearing another man's suit? This where I'm having a bit of trouble. There's no doubt Lawrence's behavior in regard to Alison is unusual for him--one of his friends calls him "Blakely, the Great Unkissed!" and is sure Lawrence won't "lose his head" over her like every other man who meets her. Is Lawrence a virgin? Is he gay?

I don't think he is gay, mainly because it doesn't make sense for his character to pursue Alison if he is. As for him being a virgin, I don't think it matters. This isn't that type of book, for one, and for another an implied gaining of masculinity or experience with the donning of Lawrence's borrowed clothes doesn't happen, since neither gentleman seems any more or less particularly "manly" than he is.

Perhaps Lawrence's different suits are more important from the perspective of Alison's character than his. Sullivan was a man who lied to her and had her in a long con; then Lawrence shows up wearing Sullivan's clothes. As with Sullivan, Alison has to decide if she can trust Lawrence, and his wearing another person's clothes symbolizes that she hasn't seen the "real" him yet.

Have you ever read a book where a character wears another character's clothes? What was the purpose in the story?