The Circular Staircase

The Circular Staircase is a mystery novel by the American writer Mary Roberts Rinehart, serialised in All-Story from November 1907 and published in book form in 1908. It was her first bestseller and the book that established her as one of the most widely read writers of her time.

The narrator is Rachel Innes, a woman of settled habits who rents a country house for the summer for herself, her niece and her nephew, and who very quickly finds herself in the middle of a crime rather than a holiday. The house has a staircase at its centre and a set of neighbours and servants with things to hide, and Rinehart tells the story through her narrator's account of what she saw and, repeatedly, what she failed to understand at the time. The novel is the origin of the habit of mystery writing in which the narrator looks back and says what she might have done differently, which became so common afterwards that it was given a name of its own.

Rinehart took the idea for the house from a visit to a Gothic Revival castle in northern Virginia. The book was filmed twice, and it is best known on stage as the play The Bat.