The Circular Staircase
1908
- classic literature
- fiction
- detective and mystery stories
- innes, rachel (fictitious character), fiction
- adirondack mountains (n.y.), fiction
- fiction, suspense
- middle-aged women
- investigation
- murder
- country homes
The story
This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind, deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies happy and prosperous. For twenty years I had been perfectly comfortable; for twenty years I had had the window-boxes filled in the spring, the carpets lifted, the awnings put up and the furniture covered with brown linen; for as many summers I had said good-by to my friends, and, after watching their perspiring hegira, had settled down to a delicious quiet in town, where the mail comes three times a day, and the water supply does not depend on a tank on the roof.
What it’s like
Crisp, dry, wryly confiding prose with a narrator who talks straight to the reader, as if across a tea table, and the whole book has the faintly stagey gloom of an old summer house: dusty chintz, brown holland covers over furniture, lamplight pooling in a rented country rooms with the windows open to pine-scented night air. The voice is brisk and funny about small domestic inconveniences (the water tank, the three post deliveries), then slides into creeping unease as the house grows strange around her, so the mood moves from cosy irony to a shiver in the corridors. Its suspense works through atmosphere more than gore: a sealed-off country estate, flickering candles, footsteps where no one should be, and a frightened, sensible heroine who keeps her nerve. Violence is off-page and the crime is handled with restraint, so it reads as a shadowy whodunit rather than anything grisly. Pacing is steady and chapter-driven, with cliffhanging turns that suit reading in one or two sittings on a stormy evening or a long train journey. This is for readers who love classic mystery with a warm, wry narrator, an older heroine who is capable and unflustered, and an old-fashioned haunted-house thrill without graphic content.
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