Review: The Case of Jennie Brice

The Case of Jennie Brice by Mary Roberts Rinehart
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A short book - I read it in not much more than a couple of hours - but full of good material. The narrator is a woman from a wealthy family who was cut off by that family completely when she ran away from school to marry an Englishman named Pitman (since deceased). Shockingly, this turned out not to be a great decision, though she's mostly philosophical about the consequences - she's now running a theatrical boarding-house in a dubious part of Pittsburg that floods each winter, near her childhood home. By coincidence, her niece, who has no idea of the relationship, becomes peripherally involved in the story.

Content warning, by the way: a number of people and animals drown in the annual floods. Mrs. Pitman is regretful but philosophical about this too.

Mrs. Pitman is very much the main character, even though as far as the events of the mystery plot go, she's at least as much observer as participant. She is the first to be suspicious when one of her boarders, Jennie Brice, disappears after quarreling with her husband, and she supplies important clues and observations, but the work of solving the case is done mostly by an amateur detective who happens by in a boat, from which he has been feeding animals trapped by the floodwaters. He gets interested in the case, and moves into the boarding house, the better to pursue it. He's retired, with a little money, so he can do what interests him.

Mrs. Pitman's character is well developed, with her occasional musings about the course of her life, her surreptitious encouragement of her niece and the niece's suitor, her rivalry with Molly Maguire next door, and her observations on the mystery.

The mystery takes several twists along the way, and is cleverly resolved. In other books I've read by this author (notably The Man in Lower Ten ), the focus was so much not on the mystery plot that I came out of it disappointed, but this one has a better balance between "story of someone involved peripherally in a mystery" and "mystery story." It also (again, unlike The Man in Lower Ten) doesn't overplay the role of coincidence. There is some coincidence, notably the connection with Mrs. Pitman's niece, but it isn't central to the plot.

Written in 1913, the book shows us a world in which telephones are becoming common, but gas lighting is still used, and there are still a lot more horse-drawn than motorised vehicles. It's an atmospheric period piece with an appealing central character and a well-plotted mystery.

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