Oft have we all heard the aged whodunit cliche “The butler did it!” But when did the butler ever do it? I’ve never heard of the butler actually having done it. How did this cliche become the cliche it became if there were never any butlers who did it?
The expression “the butler did it” is commonly attributed to novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958), who wrote dozens of popular books, starting with The Circular Staircase in 1908. In 1930 she published The Door, in which–I’m sorry if this ruins the suspense for you–the butler does it. But the words “the butler did it” do not appear in the book, as far as I can tell–I confess I skimmed–and Rinehart was hardly the first crime writer to implicate a menial. Denying her this distinction (if such it be) isn’t going to dim her legacy, however. Among connoisseurs of the detective story Rinehart is famous (or perhaps notorious) as the originator of the had-she-but-known school of crime fiction, in which the story is narrated by a once-naive-but-now-older-and-wiser woman. Formulaic though it was, this approach helped her sell roughly ten million books during her lifetime. In 1929 she helped two of her sons found the publishing house of Farrar and Rinehart, which printed her books from then on (the family name survives at Holt, Rinehart and Winston)–to my mind the surest means yet devised to guarantee a successful career as a writer.
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Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Slug Signorino.
