Fiction Friday: The Leavenworth Case

Fiction Friday: The Leavenworth Case 

Set in Baltimore, Maryland and Gunnison, Colorado, Ellie’s Escape takes place during 1878. Part of my research is to read catalogs, magazines, and books from the time period. One of the novels that Ellie could have read was The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katherine Green. 

Green was a poet and a novelist, and is credited with being one of the first writers of detective fiction. Her books are known to be well-plotted and legally accurate. She is often referred to as the “mother of the detective novel,” and Agatha Christie indicated in her autobiography that Green influenced her writing. 

The novel was published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons and weighed in at 475 pages. It became an immediate bestseller in America and Europe and shot Green to fame. Popular with both men and women, the book was also read by people of all ages. The author’s New York Times obituary stated that The Leavenworth Case was her most famous novel. Unfortunately her work has fallen into obscurity. 

A wealthy retired merchant, Horatio Leavenworth, is shot and killed in his library (shades of Clue, anyone?) Investigator Ebenezer Gryce (who would go on to star in future novels) and lawyer Everett Raymond look into the case and determined that no one could have left the house prior to the discovery of the body, creating what is known as a closed-room mystery. 

By using her knowledge of the criminal and legal industries, Green created a book that was technically accurate and included realistic procedural details. A coroner’s inquest, expert testimony, scientific ballistic evidence, a schematic drawing, and reconstructed letter hearken to future police procedural mysteries. The first “suspicious butler” also plays a role. 

The format includes a narrator who assists the detective, newspaper accounts of the case, wills and a large inheritance, a second murder, and a final confrontation which are aspects that would become standard elements in later detective fiction. Are you familiar with any of Anna Katherine Green’s novels? 

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Ellie’s Escape 

She’s running for her life. He needs a trophy wife. They didn’t count on falling in love. 

Ellie Wagner is fine being a spinster school teacher. Then she witnesses a bank hold up and can identify the bandits. Fellow robbery victim Milly Crenshaw happens to run the Westward Home & Hearts Matrimonial Agency so she arranges for Ellie to head West as a mail-order bride. But her groom only wants a business arrangement. Can she survive a loveless marriage? 

Banker Julian Sheffield is more comfortable with numbers than with people, but he’s done well for himself. Then the bank president tells him that in order to advance further he must marry in six weeks’ time. The candid, unsophisticated woman sent by the agency is nothing like he expected, but time is running out. When her past comes calling, does he have what it takes to ensure their future?

Purchase Link: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QZ14KKZ

Mystery Monday: The Mother of Detective Fiction

Mystery Monday: The Mother of Detective Fiction

If Edgar Allan Poe is often referred to as the father of the American detective story, who is its mother? Many scholars believe the answer to be Anna Katharine Green, born in Brooklyn, New York in 1846. (Metta Fuller Victor published The Dead Letter twelve years earlier, but the book was the only piece of full length mystery fiction she released, instead focusing on dime novels and short magazine stories.)

Anna graduated from Ripley Female College (now Green Mountain College) in 1866. Having met Ralph Waldo Emerson, she developed poetic ambitions which failed to gain much recognition. She turned her hand toward mystery novels, and her first novel The Leavenworth Case initially sold over 150,000 copies. Over the course of fifteen years, the book sold nearly three quarters of a million copies-a staggering number at the time. The story featured her fictional detective Ebenezer Gryce who “was not the thin, wiry individual with the piercing eye you are doubtless expecting to see. On the contrary, Mr. Gryce was a portly, comfortable personage with an eye that never pierced, that did not even rest on you.”

 

She published two more novels, A Strange Disappearance (1880) and Hand and Ring (1883) that sold well, but never met with the success of her first book. In 1884, she married Charles Rohlfs, a struggling actor nine years her junior. Unable to find success in theatre, he turned to furniture making. Anna and Charles had three children: one daughter and two sons (who both had careers in aviation as test pilots).

Over the course of her forty-five year career, Anna published forty novels, and is credited with developing the series detective. In three of her books, Gryce is assisted by society spinster Amelia Butterworth, a prototype of Miss Marple, Miss Silver, and others. Anna also invented the “girl detective” when she created Violet Strange, a debutant with a secret life as a sleuth.

Although hardly high literary work, her stories were tightly plotted and well-constructed. She used her father’s expertise as an attorney to ensure accuracy and realism. Some of her innovative plot devices include newspaper clippings as clues, expert witnesses, and the coroner’s inquest. So accurate was her work, Yale Law School used her books to demonstrate the danger of relying on circumstantial evidence. An interesting aside is the anecdote that says The Leavenworth Case sparked a debate in the Pennsylvania State Senate as to whether the book could “really have been written by a woman.”

Anna’s influence and popularity were so great that Arthur Conan Doyle sought her out during his 1894 visit to the U.S. Despite her “progressiveness,” she did believe women should get the right to vote. She passed away in 1935 at the age of eighty-eight.

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The Widow & The War Correspondent: A WWII Romance

Are a new life and new love possible in a country devastated by war?

Barely married before she’s widowed after Pearl Harbor three years ago, journalist Cora Strealer travels to England where she’s assigned to work with United Press’s top reporter who thinks the last place for a woman is on the front lines. Can she change his opinion before D-Day? Or will she have to choose her job over her heart?

A sought-after journalist, Van Toppel deserves his pick of assignments, which is why he can’t determine the bureau chief’s motive for saddling him with a cub reporter. Unfortunately, the beautiful rookie is no puff piece. Can he get her off his beat without making headlines…or losing his heart?

Pre-order Link: https://amzn.to/3bzMgVn