Tish Plays the Game

When a friend comes to her with a problem, Tish springs into action—no matter how much trouble it’s going to cause

In the title tale of this collection by Mary Roberts Rinehart, after a long, chaotic life, Tish Carberry retires to her apartment, hoping for a bit of peace and quiet. But why, her friends wonder, does it sound like someone’s practicing riflery in her living room? No one would be surprised if Tish had converted her parlor into a shooting gallery, but her friends suspect something far more sinister: She may be playing golf. Tish took an interest in the game last summer when she met a befuddled young man whose beloved was too preoccupied with the sport to even glance in his direction. Soon afterward, a mysterious old woman appeared to challenge the girl—and since then, Tish has never been quite the same.

Here are five of Rinehart’s famous Tish stories—rollicking tales of madcap humor starring one of the most fascinating older women in literary history.

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“[Rinehart’s] literary distinction lies in the combination of love, humor and murder that she wove into her tales. . . . She helped the mystery story grow up.” —The New York Times

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958) was one of the United States’s most popular early mystery authors. Born in Pittsburgh to a clerk at a sewing machine agency, Rinehart trained as a nurse and married a doctor after her graduation from nursing school. She wrote fiction in her spare time until a stock market crash sent her and her young husband into debt, forcing her to lean on her writing to pay the bills. Her first two novels, The Circular Staircase (1908) and The Man in Lower Ten (1909), established her as a bright young talent, and it wasn’t long before she was one of the nation’s most popular mystery novelists.

Among her dozens of novels are The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry (1911), which began a six-book series, and The Bat (originally published in 1920 as a play), which was among the inspirations for Bob Kane’s Batman. Credited with inventing the phrase “The butler did it,” Rinehart is often called an American Agatha Christie, even though she began writing much earlier than Christie, and was much more popular during her heyday.