The Red Lamp by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Many people enjoy getting away in the summer to a pleasant rural setting. This was the plan that professor William Porter had in mind for his summer vacation, but what he found was murder and strange and mysterious happenings which made him strongly suspect that he had made a very bad decision. What we have in this book is his journal of his summer with a record of all of the happenings and his comments upon them.

 He and his wife Jane and daughter Edith were going to the country house of Twin Hollows which he had inherited from his recently deceased uncle Horace. Jane, who had visions and premonitions, believed that something was wrong with the house and wouldn't stay there. His dog Jock wouldn't go near it. It was decided that they would stay at the lodge on the grounds of Twin Hollows and

that Edith's boy friend, Warren Halliday,  would stay in the boathouse. They rented out the main house to Mr. Bethel who was a sick old man who was writing a book, and his assistant Gordon who used too much pomade on his hair.

Uncle Horace had died, the doctor said, from a heart attack which caused him to fall down in the hall and hit his head, and he died there in the hall. When professor Porter went through Horace's desk he found a threatening letter which Horace had been writing which had a bloody thumb print on it. If Horace died as suspected how did the blood get on the letter?

Then somebody began killing sheep at the farms in the community and leaving a symbol of a triangle inside of a circle at the site of the dead sheep. This upset the local residents to an extreme degree. I am afraid that the professor does not really consider the locals to be very bright. He does not have much respect for the police either, especially when Inspector Greenough begins to believe that Professor Porter is killing the sheep himself. When these events occur, a red light is seen burning in the empty house at Twin Hollows. There is no red lamp in the house.

Then things grow worse. Murders occur and people disappears The whole community is frightened as are Professor Porter, his family and his neighbors. They even have a seance to try to connect to spirits which could be causing all of these dreadful events. They invited Professor Cameron who is a member of the Society of Physical Research to attend the second seance that they held. His students do not like him and call him "spooks".  It is at this second seance where everything was revealed in this complicated novel. This book is a combination of realistic attempts at detection by Professor Porter, and Warren Halliday, and spiritualism by Jane and her friends. I do not believe that everything was successfully resolved.

How much did Mary Roberts Rinehart believe in psychic phenomena? It is hard to tell from this book. She seems to take it quite seriously. If you are interested in her take on spiritualism and psychic phenomena, read Sight Unseen which she wrote in 1921.  It tells the story of the Neighborhood Club which conducted experiments in these type of things. It is available free at Manybooks.net as are many other Rinehart books.

This book was first published in 1925. It is available from Amazon in a variety of formats.  I read the Dell Mapback edition (pictured above) number 131 in the series which was published in 1946. The front cover illustration is by Gerald Gregg. The map may be by Ruth Belew but I an not positively sure about this.