Mystery Writer Mary Roberts Rinehart on Crime

 

Mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart posed a question to readers in a 1925 article published in the San Francisco Examiner.

“Are we all potential criminals?”

“Does reading about crime indicate criminal tendencies?” Because if it does, there might be a little larceny in all of us.

It has been argued that man is a born killer like the wild beasts he descended from. So isn’t it natural that he should return to his primitive state now and then? That could explain the rising murder rate.

Then, just as quickly, Rinehart discounted that theory. She said wild animals or beasts kill with a purpose—for food, out of rage or jealousy, or in selfdefense. Nothing has changed over the centuries. Men kill for the same reasons today.

“The truth,” she said, “seems to be that men kill, as a rule, to improve their condition or to relieve an unbearable situation.”

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