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Mary butler author1/3/2024 ![]() ![]() ![]() Rinehart never took his declarations terribly seriously. He had tried to several times before, but Mrs. He was quitting, and this time he meant it. Then death tried to come for the famed mystery writer again in Bar Harbor.īlas Reyes had had enough. “It wasn’t easy to write this story,” she told an interviewer, “but one out of every three cancer deaths is needless…could I continue to be silent?” For that interviewer, Gretta Palmer, it was important to depict Rinehart as “a woman whose abounding vitality is a contagion to all who visit her” and to “realize that she is alive as anyone that you will ever know.”Ĭancer didn’t kill Mary Roberts Rinehart, though it came close. Rinehart was also about to reveal in the July 1947 issue of Ladies Home Journal that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer in 1936, the second year she rented in Bar Harbor, and had undergone a successful mastectomy. When she published, her books sold, and sold well, most recently The Yellow Room (1945), a patented concoction of murder, mystery, suspense and romance set in a town distinctly resembling Bar Harbor. And for the next decade, Eaglesgate was that balm.Īt nearly seventy-one, Rinehart was closer to death than to her peak, but she was still regarded as the Grande Dame of American mystery fiction, even as the current genre kings & queens gravitated towards the harder-boiled, and to more realistic depictions of life and of people. ![]() A new house could not assuage lingering grief and loneliness, but a new place to entertain guests for elaborate summertime parties could act as balm. and Ted, had become her publishers since co-founding Farrar & Rinehart in 1929. Her three sons were grown, and the eldest and youngest, Stanley Jr. Her husband, Stanley, had been gone for five years, spurring her to relocate from a gigantic apartment in Washington to one on Park Avenue in New York City, and to give up another home in Wyoming because the mountain air worsened her heart condition, and she could no longer climb stairs as well as before. Frenchman’s Bay, Bar Harbor, Maine, circa 1947. She could afford several houses, and to employ several servants. Rinehart was not born rich, but the success of her novels, plays, and stories, beginning with The Circular Staircase (1908), catapulted her several rungs up the economic ladder. When Rinehart learned the estate was for sale at an absurdly low price-this was the height of the Great Depression-she pounced. She’d rented in Bar Harbor for two successive years, falling ever more in love with the island resort town by Frenchman Bay. Rinehart had purchased the sumptuous, seven-acre estate, then known as Farview, ten years before. Eaglesgate was a lot of ground to cover-literally, what with the hilltop manse, the guest houses dotting the carriage roads, and the long way down to Eden Street, one of the main streets of Bar Harbor, Maine. She had hired him earlier that summer and hoped he would suit, unlike the other butlers who had come and gone. Late in the morning of June 21, 1947, Mary Roberts Rinehart sat in the library, speaking to her butler. ![]()
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