People: People, Jun. 30, 1947

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Mary Roberts Rinehart, after nearly 40 years of turning out imaginative whodunits, found herself, at 70, face to face with hair-raising reality. Scene: the library of the 24-room Rinehart mansion in fashionable Bar Harbor, Me. (probable locale of her murderous The Yellow Room). Enter Bias Reyes, her trusted Filipino chef of 25 years, coatless and off-balance. Exit the butler.

"Where is your coat?" demanded Authoress Rinehart.

"Here it is," replied the chef, and pulled a revolver from his hip pocket. Weaving, he leveled it at her. It clicked. Mrs. Rinehart screamed, ran for the pantry, and snatched up the telephone. The revolver clicked again. The chauffeur and a maid dashed into the room, disarmed the chef, who made it to the pantry and gathered up three knives. Then the chauffeur jumped the chef, disarmed him again and held him until the police arrived. That night, in his jail cell, the chef hanged himself.

The motive? Confessed Author Rinehart, who has written many a tale about derangement and crime: "I can't think what. ..."

Inherited, from British Novelist Matthew Phipps Shiel: his home in Sussex, England; by a 13-year-old boy in Brooklyn, N.Y., whom Shiel had never met. Neither had he met the boy's mother, but she had once written him a fan letter, and the thing grew.

A Shiel legend was that he had once been king of Redonda.* "My Irish father had an admiration for kings," Shiel once wrote, "and on my 15th birthday he had me crowned King of Redonda by the Bishop of Antigua. . . ." But he was better known to the Brooklyn boy's mother, Mrs. Annamarie Miller, as the romantic writer of high-flown fantasies (The Purple Cloud, The Lord of the Sea). Mrs. Miller, now 45, wrote him her first fan letter when she was 29. The novelist wrote back. She wrote again. In his third letter, Romanticist Shiel wrote: "I think you'd better run away and come to me." She broke the news that she was married. But Shiel kept on writing to her until he died at 81. In 1933, when her son was born, Shiel wrote: "The event is historical in the passion of my life."

Said Mrs. Miller last week of the man she never saw: "I loved him, certainly, but there was none of this passion thing the papers talk about. ... I only wish I could have lived next door so that I could have typed and done odd jobs and taken care of him." How did Mrs. Miller's husband, Thomas, a garage owner, feel about all this? Said Mrs. Miller: "I think he's rather proud. ..."