February 5, 2000
Sight Unseen
Mary Roberts Rinehart

You never know if MRR”s protagonist will be male or female. She has no pattern, and seems to do both equally. In Sight Unseen it’s a man – Horace – and is all told in the first person narrative.

It starts with a séance among neighborhood friends, a group of Horace’s neighbors who gather every Monday night for dinner and discussion. This night they’re embarking on a search for the supernatural, so they bring in a young woman medium to conduct the séance. During her trance, she begins describing the scene of a murder. The next day, the group learns that one of their other neighbors, Arthur Wells, has been murdered in just the way described by the medium, presumably by his wife.

Wells is not part of “The Neighborhood Club”, as its members refer to it. He and wife Elinor are aloof and unfriendly, keeping to themselves. They are new to the neighborhood, but show no interest in being a real part of it. As a result, nobody knows much about them, except that there is sometimes another man’s car parked outside their house when Arthur isn’t home.

When Arthur is murdered his wife is the prime suspect, and Horace and best friend Sperry investigate the crime on the sly.

February 2, 2000
The Confession
Mary Roberts Rinehart

This was fairly creepy, I must say. Good setting, interesting premise, and perfect length (sometimes MRR tends to drag along).

Setting: a house in the country (she never says where, I don’t think, but the impression is posh East Coast in the 30’s or 40’s, like CT) that’s owned by “fragile, genteel old Miss Emily Benton”, who’s renting out for the summer while she stays in town. She rents it to Agnes Blakiston, a middle-aged spinster, and her servant Maggie (of course, Maggie has all the characteristics of MRR’s servant characters: superstitious, overly emotional, indignant, and a little bossy). Miss Emily practically begs Agnes to rent the house, even offering it for free at one point. Why?

After settling in for the summer, the phone calls begin. Midnight phone calls, jangling the little phone on the tiny table in the nook under the stairs. No one is ever on the line, and there is to Agnes and Maggie a sense of evil in it. One night when it rings, Maggie cries out, “Miss Agnes, you go to bed and don’t listen. There’ll be nothing there, for all your trouble. It’s nothing human that rings that bell.” That’s my favorite line. Very creepy.

Miss Emily has confessed to a murder, the confession written on a piece of paper found hidden in the phone jack. There are footprints in the garden, and someone has been in the house at night, too – burning candles and moving odd items around. Maggie is terrified, threatening to leave, but Agnes wants to solve the mystery.

Pretty dry, as her books usually are, but it’s still very subtle and effective in its horror – what the human mind can do when pushed to a breaking point. Short, too – more of a novella, put together in one binding with another novella (Sight Unseen), which I’m going to read next. ( )