Mary Rinehart 
A Poor Wise Man 

A Poor Wise Man mixes romantic fiction with political analysis. This engrossing story begins, ‘The city turned its dreariest aspect toward the railway on blackened walls, irregular and ill-paved streets, gloomy warehouses, and over all a gray, smoke-laden atmosphere which gave it mystery and often beauty. Sometimes the softened towers of the great steel bridges rose above the river mist like fairy towers suspended between Heaven and earth. And again the sun tipped the surrounding hills with gold, while the city lay buried in its smoke shroud, and white ghosts of river boats moved spectrally along…

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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’.