Temperamental People: Eight Stories of Love, Ambition, Marriage, and Human Nature

In Temperamental People, Mary Roberts Rinehart turns her keen eye for character toward men and women whose passions, ambitions, loyalties, and weaknesses refuse to stay neatly contained. This collection of eight stories ranges across strikingly different lives-a queen, a secretary, a sculptor, a singer, a wife, a cowboy, a philanderer, and a soldier-yet each tale explores the unpredictable forces that govern human behavior. The original collection contains "Her Majesty, the Queen," "The Altar on the Hill," "Cynara," "The Great Success," "The Secret House," "A Midsummer Knight's Dream," "Lily," and "Ça Ne Fait Rien." Rinehart moves easily from romance and domestic tension to humor, disappointment, sacrifice, and social observation. Her characters frequently discover that the respectable surfaces of life conceal complicated motives and private desires. Love may collide with duty, professional success may exact an unexpected price, and apparently ordinary relationships can reveal startling depths. Throughout, Rinehart combines sharply observed personalities with the narrative drive that made her fiction so widely read.

Less concerned with solving crimes than with unraveling people, Temperamental People displays another side of the author best remembered for her mysteries. These stories demonstrate Rinehart's gift for examining relationships and social expectations while keeping the reader absorbed in what her volatile, stubborn, romantic, and thoroughly human characters will do next.