THE DOOR

Murder stalks an upper-class household in this reprint of the 1930 novel Rinehart wrote to help launch her sons’ new publishing imprint, Farrar & Rinehart.

Nothing much happens in the life of Elizabeth Jane Bell, a spinster whose house is isolated from everyone but servants and relatives, such as her cousin Judy Somers, who pass through. Judy’s tenure, however, turns out to be different, marked by the discovery of a cane with a knife inside, the sighting of a suspicious man on the staircase, and the disappearance of nurse Sarah Gittings, who’s found beaten and stabbed to death several days later. Sarah’s murder is the first of so many casualties—to use the flashforward terms patented by Rinehart’s “Had I But Known” whodunits, three more fatalities and three non-fatal attacks will follow—that Elizabeth Jane’s starchy exchanges with Mary Martin, her live-in secretary, and Jim Blake, another cousin, perfectly foreshadow the interrogations to come when Inspector Harrison begins to suspect Jim of murder and the damning testimony of witnesses against him. The heart of the matter is clearly a new will prepared by Judy’s father, Howard Somers, the husband of Jim’s sister, Katherine, days before he died of causes that looked natural only for a very limited time. Despite the inevitably dated social structure—not only does Elizabeth Jane retain all those servants, but some of them play crucial roles in the plot—and some racist language, the tale maintains decorous but mounting levels of suspense all the way through to its final line, one of the best kickers in the genre.

First-time readers are advised to leave Otto Penzler’s introduction, which contains a casual whopper of a spoiler, for last.