Buzz
Reader Chris asked how the phrase “the butler did it” became a staple of mystery fiction and who the first guilty butler was.
Two early examples of criminal butlers I’ve found are Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Musgrave Ritual” from 1893 and Herbert Jenkins’ “The Strange Case of Mr. Challoner” from 1921. Although Conan Doyle’s butler isn’t the central antagonist, he attempts to rob his masters and ends up dead. Jenkins made his butler the main villain and murderer, likely the first to do so. However, it was Mary Roberts Rinehart who really popularized the butler as a detective story cliché.
Rinehart, a prolific and successful author and playwright, is sometimes called the “American Agatha Christie.” One of her plays, The Bat, featured a series of murders committed by a masked killer, a character who helped inspire Bob Kane’s creation of Batman.
In Rinehart’s 1930 novel The Door, the butler is revealed as the killer. Though the book is often credited with popularizing the phrase “the butler did it,” the phrase doesn’t actually appear in this or any of her other works. The Door was a success for Rinehart and her sons, who published it through their newly established publishing house. However, Rinehart's choice to make the butler the murderer is often viewed as a significant misstep. Just two years before, critic and detective writer SS Van Dine outlined his “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories,” in which he advised, “A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person—one that wouldn't ordinarily come under suspicion.”
Although The Door was a commercial hit, its use of what some considered a tired mystery trope made it an easy target for mockery. The butler, as the murderer, became a symbol of lazy writing, leading to titles like “What, No Butler?” and The Butler Did It that turned the character of the murderous servant into a shorthand for a weak ending.
Life Imitates Art
Years after Rinehart’s butler became the punchline of countless jokes, one of her own servants almost killed her.
In the late 1940s, Rinehart hired a new butler for her summer residence in Bar Harbor, Maine, turning down her longtime chef’s request to be promoted to the position. One afternoon, as Rinehart read in her library, the chef entered wearing a shirt without a jacket, violating her strict dress code. When she asked him about his attire, the chef replied by shouting, “Here is my coat!” as he pulled a handgun from his pocket.
He took aim at Rinehart from mere feet away and pulled the trigger, but the gun malfunctioned. Rinehart dashed out of the room, heading toward the servant’s quarters, with the chef pursuing her, struggling to fix his weapon. Rinehart’s chauffeur lunged at him, tackling him to the ground, while the housemaid swiftly disarmed him and tossed the gun outside.
While Rinehart called the police, the chef broke free from the chauffeur’s hold, grabbed two knives from the kitchen, and resumed chasing her. The gardener, coming in from the yard, joined the chauffeur in subduing the chef again, holding him until the authorities arrived.
In real life, unlike her fictional story, Rinehart’s butler didn’t do much to help. He fled the house as soon as the chaos began and caught a ride into town.
