The Bat by Mary Roberts Rinehart, Avery Hopwood and Stephen Vincent Benet

My copy of The Bat, Dell 652, cover by Walter Brooks 

As a little girl she had hesitated between wishing to be a locomotive engineer or a famous bandit--and when she had found, at seven, that the accident of sex would probably debar her from either occupation, she had resolved fiercely that some time before she died she would show the world in general and the Van Gorder clan in particular that a woman was quite as capable of dangerous exploits as a man.

Some time ago now I picked up Dell 652, The Bat, a 1950s paperback edition of a 1920s novel credited on its cover to one Mary Roberts Rinehart, a woman considered by some to be "The Queen of the Mystery Novel" and "The American Agatha Christie."  I bought it on a whim because Wonder Book in Frederick, MD, was having some kind of buy two get one free sale or something like that, I liked the cover, and I vaguely recalled my brother praising a Vincent Price film for which it served as source material and H. P. Lovecraft talking about it.  If I had a better memory I might not have bought it--today on page 80 of Essential Solitude: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth: 1926-1931, I see Lovecraft found the play upon which the novel was based to be very boring.

The Bat was apparently a huge success--the cover of one paperback edition insists it is "The bestselling spellbinder of all time!" and that it has sold over 10 million copies.  The novel, however, has a convoluted and tricky publishing history.  If I am understanding this right, in 1908 Rinehart published a mystery novel titled The Circular Staircase.  In 1920 she and Avery Hopwood came up with an adaptation of that novel for the stage that was retitled The Bat.  The play was a hit, and a novelization of the play was published under Rinehart and Hopwood's names in 1926, though it was in fact ghostwritten by Stephen Vincent Benet.  My Dell paperback is absolutely silent on all this business about a play and fails to mention Hopwood and Benet, and Dell was wise to keep mum, because if I had known any of that I would have passed on the book--a novelization of a play by a poet is like three red flags too many.  

Well, we're committed now, let's check out this 224-page caper written by the author of John Brown's Body based on a play that "wearied to yawning" H. P. Lovecraft with its "mechanical unconvincingness."

The American consciousness is dominated by a string of gruesome murders, brazen robberies, inexplicable burglaries!  At the site of each outrage is left a sign--the sign of the Bat!  As the newspapers print inch after inch about his black deeds, police officers, journalists, and underworld figures turn over every stone trying to answer the question on everyone's lips--who is the Bat?  One such seeker was Wentworth, a young detective of genius with a long career of crime-solving ahead of him--for his pains he turned up dead in a gutter, a bullet in his heart and a look of terror frozen on his face!  As our novel begins, Wentworth's friend Anderson, another young New York detective of promise, expresses his determination to bring the diabolical monster who murdered Wentworth to justice!

Mystery stories of this type need a large cast of characters to serve as potential victims and suspects, and in Chapter Two we meet a bunch more people.  We've got 65-year old spinster Cornelia Van Gorder, a rich woman who as a child had wished she could drive locomotives and/or lead bandits and who has an inexhaustible fund of youthful energy.  She has rented for the summer a country house recently vacated upon the death of its owner, bank president Courtleigh Fleming; her move to the house coincides with the shift in the location of the Bat's notorious crimes from Gotham to the suburbs!  Already resident in the house is a Japanese butler named Billy, and Cornelia brings with her her life-long maid, superstitious Irishwoman Lizzie Allen, and Cornelia's young niece, Dale.  Lizzie wants to return to NYC ASAP, because she keeps seeing odd figures in and around the house and keeps finding in the mailbox letters bearing such advice as "Go back to the city at once and save your life."  The stoical Billy in his broken English admits that the doors and windows of the large house do seem to have started opening and closing of their own accord.  

Cornelia, who craves adventure, is determined to stay, even though she is sure the threatening letters must be from the Bat, and in Chapter Three she studies the rented house with an eye to figuring out how to burglar-proof it and, in a comedic scene, for practice, fires off a revolver for the first time in her life.  More people join the cast; there's the young man who owns the house and lives at the local country club, Dick Fleming, nephew of the deceased banker; a new gardener, Brooks, a handsome young man with soft hands who admits under questioning to not being a gardener at all but a guy down on his luck; and the local sawbones, Dr. Wells, who arrives with gossip about how the Fleming bank has collapsed because somebody, assumed to be a cashier named Bailey, stole a bunch of bonds.  Rinehart, Hopwood and/or Benet make it clear we are supposed to think Brooks is really Bailey in disguise and that Bailey is Dale's secret boyfriend and that he is innocent.  For his part, the Doctor acts pretty suspiciously, doing things, like unlocking windows, that are witnessed by the omniscient narrator and us readers but not by any of the other characters.

The first chapter of The Bat is fun extravagant melodrama--like a comic book from the time before comic books were about angsty teenagers navigating their identity in a world blah blah blah--and makes it easy to fool yourself into thinking you are going to be reading a novel in which guys chase each other across rooftops and the cops bust into a barred basement with guns drawn and a damsel is hanging by one hand from a window ledge and our hero has to choose between grabbing her wrist or taking a shot at the receding figure of the man who murdered his friend.  But this novel was based on a play so Chapters Two through Twenty-One are all going to be set in a single location and involve a bunch of people running their yaps, and a significant proportion of those people are comic relief foreigners, the moaning Irish maid who is scared of ouija boards and the "Oriental" butler who knows ju-jitsu and speaks in clipped fragments.

After three or four chapters of comic relief my hopes for some action, some drive, maybe even some blood and guts, were flagging, but then revived a little with the arrival of Anderson at the house in Chapter Six.  The detective intends to spend the night awake in the house--solving the Fleming House case is the last job his boss has given him before setting him loose on the Bat.  Anderson opines that it must not be the Bat terrorizing Cornelia, because the Bat has never warned his victims ahead of time.

Despite its title, the bulk of this novel isn't about an evil mastermind who calls himself "The Bat" and pulls off all kinds of horrible crimes; the state of the text strongly suggests to me that, to construct their play, Rinehart and Hopwood just added some bat window dressing to the start and end of Rinehart's 1908 novel about embezzlement, The Circular Staircase.  Neither Anderson nor the Bat serve as main characters whose desires and decisions drive the narrative of the novel, which you might call an ensemble piece; instead, for the bulk of the book Cornelia does as much detecting as does Anderson and she serves as something like a protagonist, while it is the embezzlers who are the main villains, not the Bat.  Oy, I wouldn't have bought this book if the cover had shown an old woman--I bought it because of the bat!   

Bailey, the fake gardener and cashier on the lam, served in the World War with the architect who built the Fleming house and knows Courtleigh Fleming had a secret room built within it--Bailey and Dale figure C. Fleming stole the bonds himself and secreted them in the house and if they can find the money they can clear Bailey's name.  (The text says "bonds" at the beginning but later everyone just says "money," so maybe the thief cashed them or something?)  Dale calls up Dick Fleming this dark and stormy night to see if he has any blueprints and he comes right over.  D. Fleming, upon learning from Dale that their might be a pile of money in the house, decides he'd rather keep it for himself than return it to its rightful owners and so he and the girl fight over the blueprints, ripping them to bits; the scuffle ends when some unknown third person shoots D. Fleming dead.  Anderson investigates this crime, and Dale, to protect Bailey, tries to keep the whole business of blueprints and hidden rooms and the gardener's identity a secret from the gumshoe.  Another character enters the house, Beresford, the man who drove D. Fleming and was waiting in the car for him, and he joins the confusing arguments over who did what when and the searches of the house and the sightings of mysterious figures and all that.

We get standard detective story elements, like reenactments of the crime, the discovery of a stopped watch (the time it shows being considered significant), and people who possess clues and concoct theories and keep them to themselves instead of sharing them with others.  Maybe Rinehart herself pioneered some of these commonplaces in The Circular Staircase, I don't know.  The Bat is also a recursive story that comments on detective fiction while itself being a detective story, with Miss Cornelia doing things she has read about fictional detectives doing and comparing what is happening in the rented house to what happens in books she has read.  None of this is interesting or exciting, because there is no human emotion and people don't seem to act very rationally or believably--for example, everybody is supposed to be scared and to suspicious of others but characters will just lay the key to a locked door or a loaded firearm on a table and walk away from it or absent-mindedly turn their backs on other individuals so those individuals can sneak around the room hiding items or seizing items--the characters don't act like they are in danger so we readers can't take the danger seriously.  All the lame jokes involving Lizzie and to a lesser extent Billy (whom everybody calls "the Jap") further undermine any tension the text might generate.

In Chapter Fifteen (remember, the book has 21 chapters total) a new character appears, a disheveled man in a daze whom nobody recognizes who says he can't recall his own name or what happened to him, though the author(s) make clear he is shamming.  In the final pages of the novel this mystery man claims to be Anderson and alleges that the man we and the characters have known as Anderson for over 100 pages is the Bat.  There is a final showdown and Miss Cornelia the 65-year old spinster outwits the world's greatest criminal in an unconvincing way to save the day.  We never learn anything about The Bat's motives or personality and never see him do anything impressive, despite all the build up he has received earlier in the book and all the talk about who he might be.  (Somehow, the experience of being led to expect a bat was the main villain only to learn later that to blame was some boring money-manipulating doctor feels familiar.)

(If you care about the real plot and not the thin layer of bat action sprinkled atop it, Courtleigh Fleming and Dr. Wells worked together to fake C. Fleming's death and steal the money, which the characters find, clearing Bailey; they also find C. Fleming's body, he having been killed, I think, by the Bat.)        

The Bat is pretty bad--I am finding its apparent high reputation bewildering.  Maybe this is one of those "cozy" mysteries which isn't supposed to disturb or excite you and in which a seemingly innocuous woman solves the crime and everything turns out alright in the end?  Why all the talk on the covers about "terror" and "suspense" and "spellbinding"--and the cool bat art!--then?  Lies, all lies!

Don't you believe it