The Circular Staircase is clearly a descendant of the fifty years of detective stories which preceded it. It is probably no coincidence that BobbsMerrill, the publishers of the novel, had also published Anna Katherine Greene's The Leavenworth Case (1878), exactly thirty years earlier. Greene also created a female detective, Violet Strange, now long forgotten. Although Rinehart writes firmly in the detective tradition of Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, she shifts the focus from the eccentric detective with almost supernatural powers of detection to an ordinary person caught up in a situation in which she must call on her powers of common sense to deal with the problem in front of her. While earlier practitioners of the genre had portrayed women in their more typical role as victim, Rinehart made her detective a woman. While it is true she is an unusual one, being free...