I was about twelve when I started to read Agatha Christie and got a glimpse of the world of butlers. As fate would have it, some years later a long list of real butlers became a part of my life. Dressed in immaculate white, simply called ‘appu’ they were important individuals on tea estates in the hills. Every bungalow had one, and as we were transferred from one estate to another each appu became a part of our family. Yet, even though their duties were more or less the same, they were a far cry from the butlers found in Christie’s novels or the legendary butler of butlers, the praiseworthy Stevens in ‘The Remains of the Day.’
Except when we had visitors for dinner. If the soup was too salty, if the papadam was fried to cinders we said to our guests, ‘the butler did it.’
Of course, it’s not a crime to burn the papadam and we always assured appu it tasted great, yet we were eternally thankful for this cliché which is surely a part and parcel of all mystery writing. But where and how did the butler-did-it phrase originate? Were any fictional butlers ever actually revealed as murderers? Doesn’t the phrase lead you to think back in the days when mystery writing first began the world was seething with hatchet-wielding manservants? An investigation of the evidence, however, reveals another story entirely. The butler was framed.
If you overlook two books. History has it while suspicion had fallen on butlers with some regularity in mystery fiction, it was Herbert Jenkins who for the first time placed the knife (or in this case the pistol) directly in the butler’s hand in his novel “The Strange Case of Mr. Challoner” published as part of the collection Malcolm Sage: Detective in 1921.
But, the concept of “the butler did it” is not attributed to Jenkins. The honour goes to a lady writer called Mary Roberts Rinehart who wrote ‘The Door’ in 1930 (spoiler alert) where the butler actually is the villain. Even though the actual phrase “the butler did it,” never appears in the text it was ‘The Door,’ that locked the cliché into the imagination of the reading public.
‘The Door’ became a hit because Rinehart was already famous during the Golden Age of Mystery Writing which flourished between the two world wars. Having shot to fame on the back of The ‘Circular Staircase’, published in 1907, which sold well over one million copies and remains in print to this day by the time she wrote ‘The Door,’ in 1930, she had been a household name for 23 years, with several bestsellers under her belt.
And yet, ‘The Door’ failed to reach the high standards she had set for herself through her earlier books. Critics believe this was because she had written the story too quickly while recovering from an illness in a hospital. Her two sons had just launched a new publishing house, Farrar and Rinehart, and were hoping for an early commercial success. So Rinehart, ever the obliging mother, broke her long-standing publishing contract with Doubleday, and cranked out ‘The Door’ at top speed. Having little time to be her usual self of clever and careful plotter she pinned the crime on the butler, and gave her sons the bestseller they craved. This was sad, because doing so, she had broken a tacit law of crime fiction set by S. Van Dine, noted art critic and mystery writer, who had published the previous year a series of rules for would-be crime authors. Rule Number 11 said, in part: “A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worthwhile person – one that wouldn’t ordinarily come under suspicion.” Rinehart in her hurry had stepped on no man’s land: murdering butlers were already considered out-of-bounds.
But she was lucky. ‘The Door’ sold in large numbers. She went on to churn out some more impressive mysteries well into the 1950s and began to be called the American Agatha Christie although she wrote her first crime novel 14 years before Christie. But the cliché of the ‘butler’ had come much later. With her first mystery, ‘The Circular Staircase,’ published in 1907 she created the “Had-I-But-Known” story, described as “one where the principal character (frequently female) does things in connection with a crime that have the effect of prolonging the action of the novel.” A typical sentence would go like this: “Had I but known the killer escaped, I would not have gone for a walk in the woods.”
Understandably, not all her readers liked the way she moved the action forward by inserting previews of coming attractions. They joked about it. Ogden Nash parodied this form in his poem Don’t Guess Let Me Tell You: “Sometimes Had I But Known then what I know now I could have saved at least three lives by revealing to the Inspector the conversation I heard through that fortuitous hole in the floor.”
Yet, Rinehart’s influence on mystery writing can not be dismissed that easily. Among her prodigious output of short stories, plays and novels was The Bat, which was made into a movie twice and is credited with inspiring the character of – you guessed it – Batman.
Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania in 1876 it seems highly unlikely Rinehart who trained as a nurse and married a doctor would one day write mystery stories. She had shown an early interest in writing, however, publishing several short stories in her teens, but for all this, she might have had a conventional life as a wife and mother if, like in one of her stories, the Rinehart family hadn’t lost most of their savings in the stock market crash of 1903. Mary Rinehart then took to the typewriter with determination and wrote until she ended up with hundreds of short stories, poems, travelogues, articles, forty-six novels, eleven collections of short stories as well as the Tish and Hilda Adams series. They were all good stories judging from the fact that she was the most highly paid author in the US between the turn of the century and the end of the Second World War. Throughout her career, and financial prosperity, Reinhard possessed a marked spirit of adventure. In 1915, at thirty-eight and with three children, she left for Europe to cover World War I for the Post. She toured Belgium and was received by King Albert, taking his first authorized statement regarding the war since its start. She interviewed Winston Churchill and Queen Mary in England, toured hospitals and the French and English lines. The experience she gained triggered her imagination and she wrote the moving love story between a nineteen-year-old American girl who volunteers to run a soup kitchen at Dunkirk during the war and a young Belgian Officer whose real name is never revealed due to security reasons. Called ‘The Amazing Interlude’ the book is a must read for all romance buffs (the ebook is available for free).
Back to the butler. As with the Had-I-but-Known school of writing - the butler too became an easy target for comedians and satirical writers who quickly pounced on the butler-as-murderer archetype. As described in The Guardian, Damon Runyon’s 1933 short story “What, No Butler?” was an obvious riff on the cliché and PG Wodehouse’s 1957 comic novel “Something Fishy” was published in the US as “The Butler Did It” . Of course, a wide variety of other writers had followed Rinehart and knifed their betters, (also in violation of Van Dine’s rule), but butlers, and Rinehart too are now, unfortunately, resigned to the back alley of mystery writing.
Which is something that should surely change. For Rinehart and her butler did launch a long-lasting cliché; one that has survived well into the 21st century and thrives even on remote tea estates in Thalawakelle. Here’s hoping both the butler and the Dame of Mystery be resurrected and that the butler be given a proper crime as befits the cliché or never be framed ever again.
Henceforth, let’s make life a bit easier for all butlers, imaginary or otherwise.
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