Mary Rinehart 
The Bat (Serapis Classics) 

An elite, rich, and spunky older lady rents a country house for the summer along with her skittish Irish maid and her niece. Some servants sort of come with the property but most soon abandon their new matron due to happenings within this large mansion. A converging plot concerns the homeowner (a banker) who has recently died and whose bank has just coincidentally failed — the suspicion falls upon a youthful bank clerk who is the heart-throb of the old lady’s niece. The central plot revolves around a mysterious and effective murder/burglar dubbed by the frustrated police as The Bat and who has been operating in the vicinity of this country home. The subsequent happenings in the house are almost slapstick in nature, in the old lady’s efforts in solving the mystery of both the infamous Bat’s activities and the bank embezzlement.

About the author

Mary Roberts Rinehart (August 12, 1876 – September 22, 1958) was an American writer, often called the American Agatha Christie, although her first mystery novel was published 14 years before Christie’s first novel in 1920.

Rinehart is considered the source of the phrase ‘The butler did it’ from her novel The Door (1930), although the novel does not use the exact phrase. Rinehart is also considered to have invented the ‘Had-I-But-Known’ school of mystery writing, with the publication of The Circular Staircase (1908).

She also created a costumed super-criminal called ‘the Bat’, cited by Bob Kane as one of the inspirations for his ‘Batman’.