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Her first novel, The Circular Staircase, was a mystery tale; so was her second, The Man in Lower Ten. They appeared in 1908 and 1909 respectively. Her first play had been produced in New York in 1907. This was Double Life, staged at the Bijou Theater. In conjunction with her husband, she wrote The Avenger (1908) and much later she collaborated with Avery Hopwood in the highly successful farce Seven Days. This was first played at the Astor Theater, New York. In 1913, at the Harris Theater, New York, her farce Cheer Up was put on. “Two plays were successful,” in Mrs. Rinehart’s opinion.

She has written short stories for all the most popular American magazines—the Saturday Evening Post perhaps particularly; McClure’s, Everybody’s, Collier’s, the American and the Metropolitan are others she enumerates offhand. And her short stories are among the most excellent produced by a living American writer. Some of them, unified by possession of the same principal character or characters, have been published in book form, as Tish and Bab, a Sub-Deb. The stories in Tish relate various escapades of an unmarried woman of advanced years, the heroine of Mrs. Rinehart’s earlier novel, The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry. Letitia Carberry, “Tish,” is a person without a literary parallel. Well-to-do, excitement-loving, curious, with a passion for guiding the lives of two other maidens like herself, Lizzie and Aggie; with a nephew, Charlie Sands, who throws up hopeless hands before her unpredictable performances, Miss Carberry is unique and funny beyond easy characterization. She pokes at the carburetor with a hairpin, rides horseback in a divided skirt, puts great faith in blackberry cordial, shoulders a shotgun and mends the canoe with chewing gum. These things in the tales composing Tish; in The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry we have a story in which the mystery of extraordinary and scandalous occurrences in a hospital where Tish is a patient is finally solved by her efforts. Nothing affords a better exhibition of Mrs. Rinehart’s skill as a story-teller than this novel. Things that with less skillful handling would be both ghoulish and shocking, are so related that they strike the reader merely as bizarre or outrageously laughable, or as heightening the unguessable puzzle of what is to come. The technical triumph is very great, as great as that achieved in the last half of George M. Cohan’s play, Seven Keys to Baldpate, where a corpse is lugged about without offending the observer. The Amazing Adventures of Letitia Carberry is a remarkable evidence of the lengths to which farce can be carried and remain inoffensive—and become the source of helpless mirth.