Rinehart's heroine is thorny and unpleasant, and I expect she was meant to be so when written, although the particulars we object to probably aren't what they were. Rachel Innes is an old maid with money and DAR membership and antique china, and a revolver, which she's willing to fire into the dark (and into the china; or maybe it was only rented china). The plot is on the way from Gothic to noir. (The noir wrongsters are trying to hide behind Gothic superstitions; there's a plotline that springs immortal.) Innes chances onto the adventure and digs in; she's quite a tough old bird, who looks back on her adventures in secret rooms and graveyards with great pleasure:
...from perhaps a half-civilized ancestor who wore a sheepskin garment and trailed his food or his prey, I have in me the instinct of the chase. Were I a man I should be a trapper of criminals, trailing them as relentlessly as no doubt my sheepskin ancestor did his wild boar. But being an unmarried woman, with the handicap of my sex, my first acquaintance with crime will probably be my last.
What's annoying now is her racism and her unkindness to her companion. The racism, as is frequent, does absolutely nothing for the plot, and doesn't match the actual behavior of characters in the story; Thomas Johnson is no more nervous and superstitious than any of the servants. While he's alive, Innes mocks him (in narration, not dialogue) with jets of stereotyped bile; once he's dead, he earns praise for being a moral person; much of his morality has been loyalty to his employers, who are dubiously worthy, so this grudging respect has no redeeming value for an egalitarian. (There is one thing that left me curious; is the Methodist minister who she condescendingly, but openly, admires, black or not? If he is, her treatment of him is probably unusually respectful. If he isn't, why does he officiate at African Zion Church? Do they not have a pastor of their own? It is a tiny town.)
The classism of the whole thing is inescapable anyway. Innes' unlikable character may be what keeps it readable now; she doesn't even expect to be liked, only to be respected for her considerable force of personality and inheritance.
Project Gutenberg text #434
So wrote clew in Fiction (20th c.). | TrackBack