The Leavenworth Case
THIS DETECTIVE STORY CLUB CLASSIC is introduced by Dr John Curran, who looks at how Anna Katherine Green was a pioneer who inspired a new generation of crime writers, in particular a young woman named Agatha Christie.When the retired merchant Horatio Leavenworth is found shot dead in his mansion library, suspicion falls on his nieces, Mary and Eleanore, who stand to inherit his vast fortune. Their lawyer, Everett Raymond, infatuated with one of the sisters, is determined that the official investigator, detective Ebenezer Gryce, widens the inquiry to less obvious suspects.The Leavenworth Case, the first detective novel written by a woman, immortalised its author Anna Katharine Green as ‘The Mother of Detective Fiction’. Admired for her careful plotting and legal accuracy, the book enjoyed enormous success both in England and America, and was widely translated. It was republished by The Detective Story Club after Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, speaking at the 1928 Thanksgiving Day dinner of the American Society in London, remarked: ‘An American woman, a successor of Poe, Anna K. Green, gave us The Leavenworth Case, which I still think one of the best detective stories ever written.’
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Published by COLLINS CRIME CLUB
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons 1878
Published by The Detective Story Club for Wm Collins Sons & Co. Ltd 1929
Introduction © John Curran 2016
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1929, 2016
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780008137595
Ebook Edition © August 2016 ISBN: 9780008137601
Version: 2016-06-22
Table of Contents
Chapter II: The Coroner’s Inquest
Chapter III: Facts and Deductions
Chapter VIII: Circumstantial Evidence
Chapter X: Mr Gryce Receives New Impetus
Chapter XVI: The Will of a Millionaire
Chapter XVII: The Beginning of Great Surprises
Chapter XX: ‘Trueman! Trueman! Trueman!’
Chapter XXIII: The Story of a Charming Woman
Chapter XXIV: A Report Followed by Smoke
Chapter XXVI: Mr Gryce Explains Himself
Chapter XXVIII: A Weird Experience
Chapter XXIX: The Missing Witness
Chapter XXXII: Mrs Belden’s Narrative
Chapter XXXIII: Unexpected Testimony
Chapter XXXIV: Mr Gryce Resumes Control
Chapter XXXVI: Gathered Threads
Chapter XXXVIII: A Full Confession
NOT ONLY was Anna Katharine Green (1846–1935) the first woman to write a detective novel—thereby earning the soubriquet ‘The Mother of Detective Fiction’—but she also included in it many themes and ideas that later became commonplace in the genre.>fn1 And as further proof of her importance in the development of detective fiction she also introduced, later in her career, two distinct ‘types’ of detective, each very different, each contributing to an emerging form; and each much copied in the years that followed.
Born into a well-to-do family in New York’s Brooklyn Heights, Anna Catherine>fn2 Green was raised, on the death of her mother, by a stepmother who encouraged Anna’s interest in writing. After graduating with a B.A. from Ripley College in Vermont in 1866—an impressive achievement for a woman at that time—she submitted some poems to the eminent American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. He encouraged her to continue writing, but advised her to abandon poetry. Green, fearing that her lawyer father would not approve of novel-writing, began, in secret, to write a detective novel. When, on its completion, she did show it to him, he was sufficiently impressed—possibly because of the novel’s significant legal content—to arrange for a well-known critic to bring it to the attention of publisher George Putnam. The Leavenworth Case: A Lawyer’s Story was published in the US in 1878 and in the UK the following year. It was an immediate success and marked the beginning of a prolific writing career.
Appearing almost half a century before the heyday of the Golden Age, The Leavenworth Case embodies many of that era’s distinctive features. Ebenezer Gryce, described by himself as ‘a professional detective’, and one who would feature in a dozen novels over the following thirty years, investigates the murder, in his New York home, of wealthy Horatio Leavenworth. The reader is presented with the body in the locked library, a victim on the point of changing his will, a floor-plan of the murder scene, a coroner’s inquest with medical and ballistic evidence, and a second death. We encounter a lawyer-narrator, Everett Raymond, with a romantic interest in the outcome of the case, a butler, a secret marriage, an initialled handkerchief, a second floor-plan, and that device beloved of many later Golden Age writers: a numbered listing of significant points. All of these are instantly recognisable from hundreds of detective novels over the following century.
