Quote of the day:
The opportunity for doing mischief is found a hundred times a day, and of doing good once in a year.
—Voltaire
Everett Raymond had been a junior partner in the law firm of Veeley, Carr & Raymond for about a year when a young man appeared at the office in the temporary absence of both the senior partners.
“I have come to see Mr. Veeley; is he in?” inquired the young man, whose appearance was indicative of haste and agitation.
On being informed that Mr. Veeley had been unexpectedly called away, the young man blurted out his purpose for the visit: “My business is no secret. I came to inform him that Mr. Leavenworth is dead.”
So begins The Leavenworth Case, the first and best known novel of Anna Katharine Green.
Miss Green was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 11, 1846. Her mother died shortly after Green was born, and her father eventually moved the family to Buffalo. Green went to the Ripley Female College in Vermont and had the good fortune to meet Ralph Waldo Emerson with whom she began a correspondence. She wanted to be a poet, but her first attempts at poetry having met with little success, she turned to writing fiction.
The first novel she turned out was destined to shape the detective novel into its classic form. This was ten years before Conan Doyle published his first Sherlock Holmes novel. Her detective was quirky Ebenezer Gryce, and although he worked for the New York Metropolitan Police Force, some of his methods were a bit unconventional. And yet with all that, her book was used for a time at Yale Law School to show how damaging it can be to rely on circumstantial evidence.
So how does her book hold up today?
Pretty well, actually, provided you can get past the Victorian language and conventions of 1878. Green weaves a complex web, but today’s whodunit readers will probably not have much difficulty in figuring out who the culprit is.
It’s actually rather remarkable to realize that she didn’t have Agatha Christie or any other golden age whodunit writer as a model. She created the model.
She was not the first woman to write a detective novel; that was Seeley Regester with The Dead Letter, several years earlier, but by setting the standard by which future whodunits would come to be written, she has come to be known as the “mother of the detective novel”.
Previous to Green, Edgar Allan Poe had invented the detective short story. As far as novels went, Dickens included a whodunit as a subplot in Bleak House, and he left The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished at his death. Wilkie Collins had written The Moonstone and The Woman in White.
Green’s The Leavenworth Case was compared favorably to Wilkie Collins.
I found a contemporary review that was favorable but ended thusly: “But we do not see why, for the money, the author could not have given us the execution scene by way of finale.”
Anna Katharine Green died in Buffalo on April 11, 1935.
If you’re interested in reading The Leavenworth Case, you have several choices. It’s available in several editions on Amazon, paperback, Kindle, and audio. Note that the Penguin edition has an introduction by Michael Sims.
As it’s in the public domain, you can also find a free version at Project Gutenberg: The Leavenworth Case
If you visit there, check out all the other Anna Katharine Green books that they have.
Note: When you purchase something after clicking Amazon links in my posts, I may earn a small commission. As of this date, I have yet to earn anything. 😎