#20booksofsummer23 is a reading challenge started by 746 Books where participants attempt to read 10, 15, or 20 books off of their TBR and review them between June 1 – September 1, 2023. I am trying to read and review 6-7 books that I picked per month. You can see my complete reading list here.
I bought The After House at a used bookstore of how much I loved Mary Robert’s Rinehart’s other mystery novels, The Bat and The Circular Staircase– which I maintain are suspenseful masterpieces. Sold on previous goodwill and the Rinehart name, I was excited to read The After House…and it was a huge disappointment.
The After House is narrated by newly graduated medical doctor Ralph Leslie, who, after a severe bought of typhoid fever, has a few dollars to his name and one good suit. It’s the summer, and with good medical posts not being available until the fall, he decides to capitalize on his sense of adventure and asks the Captain of the Ella if he needs any sailors for the summer. The Captain, unimpressed by his starved, sickly look, dismisses him outright, but he catches the eye of a young woman who is sailing on the luxury boat, and she asks him to be a steward to the Turner family, who are the yacht owners.
Fully ensconced in his new role as steward, he struggles to maintain appropriate relationships with the family and their black butler in his lowered station. He gets on better with the sailors but is not one of them. A few days into the voyage, he settles into his new life and begins observing the Turner family; Marshall Turner, the yacht’s owner, and head of a powerful family, terrorizes his family and crew with his violent alcoholic outbursts. He fights with his wife, business partner, and the boat’s Captain until he falls asleep. The women on the ship frightened that Turner will still be violent when he wakes, ask Leslie to sleep near the After House (the deckhouse nearest the stern of the boat).
Leslie is awakened by a noise in the middle of the night, and when he goes to check on the family, he finds himself locked in his room. He finally escapes and hears horrible noises. When he goes to check on the family, he finds Turner’s business partner, a maid, and the Captain of the ship, hacked to death with an ax.
Suspicions quickly fall on the drunk first officer, who has quarreled with the Captain. He is thrown in the Brig, and Marshall Turner, still angry and drunk, is locked in his cabin to detox for the rest of the trip. Without a Captain or a first officer, the crew elects Leslie as their leader. Leslie must find a brutal killer and pilot the yacht back to shore. The stakes are high two weeks from the port, with three bodies on board.
The claustrophobic and closed-circle set up of The After House is excellent. The murders are surprisingly grisly, and there’s proper tension in the sparse story. Leslie and the reader are correctly terrified, and the dreadful isolation is palpable.
The story told through Ralph Leslie, has been stilted until the murder. Once the crew coalesces behind him, I expected to see his mettle and heroic rise. Still, Leslie’s desperation to conceal his medical training and secretive nature makes it difficult for the other characters to trust him- the women go so far as to ban him from part of the ship because they don’t trust him. His continued conflict with all of the remaining characters, because Ralph Leslie is so self-absorbed, makes it so the reader isn’t learning about the other crew members who might have committed the crime; therefore, the story suffers. If Ralph Leslie had revealed his medical training and taken control of the investigation, the reader could have solved the case with him.
As the book is written, the reader cannot solve the case; we learn so little about the other sailors, and what we do know is mostly in one-sentence assumptions by Ralph Leslie. How the killer is revealed and the motivations behind the killings are ridiculous and nonsensical.
The After House offers a perfectly perfunctory love story. Ralph Leslie touches the hand of a beautiful girl and decides he loves her. The aloof and lovely girl is only an object to be won by Ralph Leslie. She is attracted to him for unspecified reasons- because he is a man of the right age, with good looks, I suspect- and in the end, they get married.
I was surprised by the handling of the women in The After House, mainly because Mary Roberts Rinehart writes strong female characters who are often led in her other works. All of the clever banter between women in the Bat is absent in The After House. Usually, her female characters are strong and do not rely on men to solve the mystery. In The After House, the women barely speak to each other and are sequestered away from the men- straining limited resources as one man must always guard the women.
The After House is also overtly racist, with only negative things being said about the black butler serving the Turner family; he is portrayed as a coward, and at one point, Leslie physically assaults him and threatens to throw him overboard because “he doesn’t like the look of him.”
Sigh.
The After House represents all of the racist, sexist, and classist attitudes of it’s time and the mystery is unsolvable based on what is presented to the reader. I don’t recommend The After House, but thank you for reading this review.
Reviews of The After House
Previous #20booksofsummer23
Golden Age of Detective Fiction 
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