An elite, rich, and spunky older lady rents a country house for the summer along with her skittish Irish maid and her niece. Some servants sort of come with the property but most soon abandon their new matron due to happenings within this large mansion. A converging plot concerns the homeowner (a banker) who has recently died and whose bank has just coincidentally failed—the suspicion falls upon a youthful bank clerk who is the heart-throb of the old lady's niece. The central plot revolves around a mysterious and effective murder/burglar dubbed by the frustrated police as The Bat and who has been operating in the vicinity of this country home. The subsequent happenings in the house are almost slapstick in nature, in the old lady's efforts in solving the mystery of both the infamous Bat's activities and the bank embezzlement. This is the novelization of the play "The Bat" (a play which was adapted by Mary Elizabeth Rinehart and Avery Hopwood from her novel "The Spiral Staircase") credited to Rinehart and Hopwood, but ghostwritten by Stephen Vincent Benét.
Author
Mysteries of known American writer Mary Roberts Rinehart include The Circular Staircase (1908) and The Door (1930). People often called this prolific author often the American version of Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie. She, considered the source, used not the phrase "The butler did it," and people also consider that she invented the "Had-I-But-Known" school of mystery writing. Rinehart wrote hundreds of short stories, poems, travelogues, and special articles. People adapted many of her books and plays for movies, such as The Bat (1926), The Bat Whispers (1930), and The Bat (1959). Amid many of her best-selling books, critics most appreciated her murder mysteries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary\_Ro...
