Mary Roberts Rinehart

Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1876, she trained as a nurse before turning to writing. That medical background, along with her eye for everyday detail, gave her fiction a grounded feel even when the plots turned thrilling. She became one of the most popular American writers of her time, known especially for mystery stories and novels such as The Circular Staircase and The Man in Lower Ten.

She is often remembered as an early master of suspense and as an important influence on later crime fiction. Her work helped popularize the "had-I-but-known" style of storytelling, in which a narrator looks back on dangerous events with hindsight. She also wrote plays, and The Bat, which she co-wrote, became a major success and helped inspire later haunted-house and detective stories on stage and screen.

Her career stretched well beyond novels. She worked as a journalist and war correspondent during World War I, and her writing reached a huge audience in books, magazines, theater, and film adaptations. By the time of her death in 1958, she had built a lasting reputation as one of the key early voices in American mystery and popular fiction.