Married People: A Collection of Short Stories

Ten tales of married life: happy, sad, and blood-soaked
Clarke Wellington supposes it's time he murdered his wife. Dolly isn't a promiscuous woman, and she isn't violent, but she is stingy, petty, and cruel, and she runs her household with a tyranny that has turned her husband into a mouse and her children into frightened little automatons. Of course, it's easy to make this kind of decision, but much harder to follow through. When a man hasn't stood up for himself in years, how can he possibly learn to kill?
"The Man Who Killed His Wife" is just one in this sterling collection of short stories by a master of the classic mystery novel. Rinehart tells her tales one couple at a time, from the Wellingtons to the Bryces to the Chisholms. In some of their houses is physical violence, and in some, the torment is purely emotional. Not until death will these happy couples part, but that day is coming sooner than some of them think. Read more Continue reading Read less REVIEW
"[Rinehart's] literary distinction lies in the combination of love, humor and murder that she wove into her tales. . . . She helped the mystery story grow up." - The New York Times ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958) was one of the United States's most popular early mystery authors. Born in Pittsburgh to a clerk at a sewing machine agency, Rinehart trained as a nurse and married a doctor after her graduation from nursing school. She wrote fiction in her spare time until a stock market crash sent her and her young husband into debt, forcing her to lean on her writing to pay the bills. Her first two novels, The Circular Staircase (1908) and The Man in Lower Ten (1909) , established her as a bright young talent, and it wasn't long before she was one of the nation's most popular mystery novelists.
Among her dozens of novels are The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry (1911) , which began a six-book series, and The Bat (originally published in 1920 as a play) , which was among the inspirations for Bob Kane's Batman. Credited with inventing the phrase "The butler did it," Rinehart is often called an American Agatha Christie, even though she began writing much earlier than Christie, and was much more popular during her heyday. Read more Continue reading Read less