The Leavenworth Case (Penguin Classics)

by Anna Katharine Green

  Wherever you turn in the history of detective stories, Green’s influence shows up. In Agatha Christie’s 1963 novel The Clocks, for example, Hercule Poirot holds forth about various early crime stories. He applauds The Mystery of the Yellow Room, the 1907 impossible-crime novel by Gaston Leroux of Phantom of the Opera fame, and of course lauds the Sherlock Holmes stories. Then he says of The Leavenworth Case, “One savours its period atmosphere, its studied and deliberate melodrama.” Christie herself had savored the novel since the age of eight, when her sister Madge read it to her. When she published her own first novel in 1920, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, she too created an elderly male detective, the vainglorious Poirot. Considering Christie’s fondness for Green’s writing, surely she read the later Ebenezer Gryce novels—including That Affair Next Door and other cases that Gryce shared with the first meddlesome spinster sleuth in detective fiction, Amelia Butterworth, a worthy ancestor of Miss Jane Marple (in fact, a more rounded, amusing, and believable character).

  Christie adopted Green’s habit of telling a story mostly in dialogue and even her gimmick of having characters misconstrue what they overhear. Christie, Conan Doyle, and others also followed Green’s example in employing what would later be called a multimedia text. In Leavenworth, Green includes two scene diagrams and two samples of handwriting, one of which is reversed because it appears scratched on a windowpane.

  The atmosphere and melodrama that Christie admired owe something to the so-called sensation novels—books such as Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, all of which appeared between 1859 and 1862. Green chose not to follow directly in their path, but she learned from them. Such books tore away the comforting notion that scandal and melodrama belonged only to Gothic settings; sensation writers brought violent events and family secrets out of haunted castles and into drawing rooms. They were so popular that W. S. Gilbert parodied them in his 1871 comic opera A Sensation Novel.

  Green’s first and longest-running series detective, Ebenezer Gryce, advances beyond two particular ancestors. In 1852 Charles Dickens created Inspector Bucket, a secondary character in Bleak House but the first important fictional detective. He investigates the mysterious past of Lady Dedlock. Middle-aged, sharp-eyed Bucket seems to materialize in a room like a phantom, so quiet is his approach; and he looks at one character, as Dickens remarks with his usual offhand genius for simile, “as if he were going to take his portrait.” Bucket’s intense gaze belies his lethargic pose. Then in 1868 came Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone, by Dickens’s friend Wilkie Collins, the king of sensation writers. Cuff is “a grizzled, elderly man, so miserably lean that he looked as if he had not got an ounce of flesh on his bones in any part of him,” and his eyes, “of a steely light gray, had a very disconcerting trick, when they encountered your eyes, of looking as if they expected something more from you than you were aware of yourself.”

  By the time Green started writing, readers were already assuming that a detective character’s raison d’être in a novel was his literal and symbolic penetrating gaze. When she created Ebenezer Gryce a decade after The Moonstone, Green amusingly rejected this idea in the very first chapter:

  Mr. Gryce, the detective, was not the thin, wiry individual with a shrewd eye that seems to plunge into the core of your being and pounce at once upon its hidden secret that you are doubtless expecting to see. Mr. Gryce was a portly, comfortable personage with an eye that never pounced, that did not even rest—on you. If it rested anywhere, it was always on some insignificant object in your vicinity, some vase, inkstand, book or button. These things he would seem to take into his confidence, make the repositories of his conclusions, but you—you might as well be the steeple on Trinity Church, for all the connection you ever appeared to have with him or his thoughts.

  Tireless, rheumatic, and sardonic, Gryce is a wonderful character who stands comfortably beside other great eccentrics in the field. “Oh, beautiful!” he exclaims when pieces of evidence fit together. The narrator asks him, “Whom do you suspect?” and Gryce replies with the kind of oracular ambiguity later immortalized by Sherlock Holmes, “Everyone and nobody.” This remark sounds like a cliché because it has since become one; but readers heard it here first. Green’s detective even propounds a manifesto that would be strikingly reminiscent of Holmes had not Gryce said it a decade before the debut of the sage of Baker Street: “Now it is a principle which every detective recognizes the truth of, that if of a hundred leading circumstances connected with a crime, ninety-nine of these are acts pointing to the suspected party with unerring certainty but the hundredth equally important act one which that person could not have performed, the whole fabric of suspicion is destroyed.” And Gryce distinguishes between inquisition and investigation with a single remark: “It is not enough to look for evidence where you expect to find it.”

  Unlike Bucket and Cuff, Gryce has something of a Watson to tell his story in The Leavenworth Case, although he appears only in this one novel: our narrator, Everett Raymond. But the story’s camera-eye doesn’t follow Gryce all the time, because Raymond is no passive admirer dogging his master’s footsteps. He has an agenda of his own. He is an intelligent, passionate, and impulsive lawyer who hounds across the countryside sniffing for clues because, as you will soon discover, he falls for one of Leavenworth’s beautiful nieces. Raymond is an excellent point-of-view character. Driven by emotion but determined to employ his professional brain in the cause of justice, he pays close attention, thinks aloud, and inaugurates what will become a detective story tradition: he regularly summarizes the clues glimpsed so far.

  These were not the only genre conventions that Green established; she also provides the aforementioned diagrams of crime scenes and wraps up the story with a trap-laden assembly of suspects. Throughout The Leavenworth Case, while her characters are caught up in the tempest, the author calmly presents the crime as a puzzle to be worked out. Book I is called “The Problem” and Book IV “The Problem Solved.” Green liked the mathematical-sounding word problem, and she would use it again elsewhere, including in the title of a 1915 story collection about a female detective, The Golden Slipper, and Other Problems for Violet Strange. In this case the problem is a SHOCKING MURDER, as one headline shouts before adding in a stage whisper, “Mr. Leavenworth, the Well-Known Millionaire, Found Dead in His Room.” This kind of lighthearted, escapist detective story is more fun when the victim is wealthy. Riches increase the motivation and also furnish an exotic setting—“the glow of satin, glitter of bronze, and glimmer of marble,” as Everett Raymond remarks. The author turns Horatio Leavenworth’s Gilded Age palace into the New York City version of an English country house, replete with butler, maids, cook, amanuensis, and, of course, the eccentric and reclusive millionaire and his beautiful orphaned nieces. Throughout her career, she would often build a story around a single family or a single setting. In this characteristic too, Agatha Christie would follow her model, gradually expanding it to include brilliant variations such as Murder on the Orient Express.

  I find it interesting that Green is no less preoccupied with class structure than her later colleagues across the Atlantic. During the 1870s, as Green was writing The Leavenworth Case, the notorious Mrs. Astor was directing the selection of four hundred old-family New Yorkers who would become the new American aristocracy and be permitted to enter the sacred precincts of her Fifth Avenue ballroom. The servants in the Leavenworth household reflect the influx of Irish immigrants in the decades following the potato famine; by 1890, there would be more Irish in New York than in Dublin. Leavenworth’s glum secretary, in contrast, is distinctly middle class, precisely attuned to the distinctions between himself and the rest of the staff.

  When Ebenezer Gryce wants to persuade the narrator to spy for him—that is, to watch for evidence behind the scenes—he explains first that there is one disguise that he himself cannot execute convincingly: “I have never by any possibility of means
succeeded with one class of persons at all. I cannot pass myself off for a gentleman. Tailors and barbers are no good; I am always found out.” Everett Raymond is a gentleman who became an attorney, and the policeman cannot possibly join him in this exclusive club. Gryce says to him, “Now you, I dare say, have no trouble———was born one, perhaps. Can even ask a lady to dance without blushing, eh?” When Raymond later complains that there was simply no way to stop a woman from mailing a certain epistle, Gryce mutters, “That is because you are a gentleman.” Raymond doesn’t deny his elevated position; he happily observes the world from the height of privilege. When a humble laborer professes himself dazzled by a lady’s beauty, Raymond thinks, “I could but wonder over a loveliness capable of swaying the low as well as the high.”

  Sometimes, like Jane Austen, Anna Katharine Green describes characters more in terms of the overall implications of their social status than with actual physical description. Consider the young man “whose sleek appearance, intelligent eye, and general air of trustworthiness, seemed to proclaim him to be, what in fact he was, the confidential clerk of a responsible mercantile house.” Arthur Conan Doyle, and therefore Sherlock Holmes, interpreted the world via more specific details of status—a racing form protruding from a goose-monger’s pocket, the double line on a typist’s plush sleeve.

  In her social-criticism mode, while confidently employing a male narrator, Green has fun with stereotypes about her own gender. “Women,” mutters one of Gryce’s assistants, “are a mystery.” Raymond himself advises a client, “Of old, the modes of getting a wife were the same as those of acquiring any other species of property, and they are not materially changed at the present time.” The dependent legal status of women plays an important role in the story. Yet Green opposed the women’s suffrage movement. Throughout her life she remained socially conservative, fond of old-fashioned clothes and furnishings, and sympathetic to women’s issues but resistant to what she saw as radical or unseemly behavior. In 1917, at the height of World War I—when she was in her seventies and famous and rich—Green wrote a public letter to the New York Times urging men to vote against granting women the right to vote, because it would confuse government, encourage immodesty, provoke marital discord, and unnecessarily add to the traditional burdens of women.

  Although Raymond is the narrator and Gryce the official detective, another character grows ever more important as the story progresses—“the horrible, blood-curdling it,” as Raymond exclaims, “that yesterday was a living, breathing man.” Although Horatio Leavenworth is dead before the story opens, “Death by murder is in a way not an end but a beginning,” as Ruth Rendell observes in one of her Inspector Wexford novels. “The lives of the naturally dead may be buried with them,” says Rendell, but murder victims’ lives are exposed, one piece at a time, until they take on “the character of a celebrity’s biography.” In fiction as in reality, old sins cast long shadows. “One must go farther back than this murder,” muses Raymond about the death of Horatio Leavenworth, “to find the root of a mistrust so great. . . .”

  After The Leavenworth Case, Anna Katharine Green’s fame grew through more than three dozen books in the mystery field, from A Strange Disappearance in 1880 to The Step on the Stair in 1923. She quickly developed a work schedule, beginning to write around 9:00 a.m. and working into the afternoon, only to often return again after dinner, when she would read her day’s work aloud for her husband and children and governess to critique. She was her own most severe critic, of course, and often paused in reading to jot marginal notes on the pages. Ebenezer Gryce returned in several novels and some stories, and three times he was joined by the quick-witted spinster, Amelia Butterworth. After her first couple of novels, Green published a volume of twenty-six early poems, The Defence of the Bride. “Vigorous productions,” Harper’s magazine called the poems, and the reviewer added the highest compliment he could imagine, proclaiming this young woman’s poetry to be absolutely masculine in its power and concision. Later Green also published a drama, Risifi’s Daughter.

  Green’s seemingly risky choice of husband proved as wise as her determination to pursue a career instead of sitting quietly in the parlor and chatting about fashion. Besides acting now and then—in Shakespeare and Molière and a stage version of The Leavenworth Case—Charles Rohlfs became an acclaimed industrial designer and furniture designer. In a recent article, art historian Joseph Cunningham called Rohlfs “one of the most enigmatic and celebrated American designers of the early twentieth century,” and went on to examine the ways that his wife collaborated with him on much of his best-known work. A desk chair they designed together is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Together, Green and Rohlfs raised three children; two sons embraced the new century to the point of becoming pilots.

  Green didn’t publish any more books after 1923, but even this date was in the modern era that critics often call the Golden Age of detective fiction. Agatha Christie had published her first Poirot novel three years earlier and was moving toward becoming the Anna Katharine Green of the twentieth century. Before the end of the decade, such influential forces as Raymond Chandler and Ellery Queen would appear. Upon Green’s death on April 11, 1935, at the age of eighty-eight, Publishers Weekly reported that her first book had sold more than a million copies.

  Her grave, in Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo, bears her name incised next to others on a single large family stone labeled ROHLFS. There is no mention of her fame. But literary characters, unlike their creators, live beyond the grave. The mortal remains of Anna Katharine Green rest underground, but Amelia Butterworth and Ebenezer Gryce and Violet Strange are still cavorting in the minds of readers. A century and a third after their first appearance, the characters in The Leavenworth Case stand poised to reenact the drama. Turning the first page, you will open the door at the firm of Veeley, Carr & Raymond and find ambitious young Everett Raymond seated behind a desk. Someone is coming in to announce the shocking murder of Mr. Leavenworth.

  MICHAEL SIMS

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  “Anna Katharine Green Tells How She Manufactures Her Plots.” Literary Digest 58 (July 1918): 48.

  Bargainnier, Earl F., ed. 10 Women of Mystery. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1981.

  Christie, Agatha. Agatha Christie: An Autobiography. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1977. Christie describes her early fondness for Green’s books.

  Cunningham, Joseph. “Anna Katharine Green and Charles Rohlfs: Artistic Collaborators.” Antiques, December 2008.

  Green, Anna Katharine. “Why Human Beings Are Interested in Crime.” American Magazine 87, no. 2 (February 1919): 38–39, 82–86.

  ———. “Women Must Wait.” New York Times, October 30, 1917, 14.

  Hatch, Mary R. P. “An American Gaboriau.” The Daily Inter Ocean 18, no. 119 (July 21, 1889): 21.

  Haycraft, Howard. Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story. 1941, revised 1951. Reprint, New York: Carroll & Graf, 1984.

  Maida, Patricia D. Mother of Detective Fiction: The Life and Works of Anna Katharine Green. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989. Maida’s book provided much of the personal information about Green that appears in the introduction to the present volume.

  Murch, Alma E. The Development of the Detective Novel. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1981.

  Nickerson, Catherine Ross. The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 1998.

  Snyder, Ruth. “Life’s Facts as Startling as Fiction, Says Writer, 76.” The Indianapolis Sunday Star, May 13, 1928, 16.

  Steinbrunner, Chris, and Otto Penzler. Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976. This essential volume provides a great deal of background on early detective fiction.

  WEB SITES

  http://www.ladybluestocking.com/index.htm. This site features facsimile dust jackets for vintage books, including many of Green’s. />
  http://motherofmystery.com/articles/plots. This excellent site provides access to online versions of numerous articles by and about Anna Katharine Green, including most of those cited above.

  http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/green.html. This site, hosted by the Tarlton Law Library’s Law in Popular Culture Collection, at the University of Texas at Austin, features a Green chronology and bibliography.

  BOOK I

  THE PROBLEM

  CHAPTER 1

  “A Great Case”

  A deed of dreadful note.

  —MACBETH.

  I had been a junior partner in the firm of Veeley, Carr & Raymond, attorneys and counselors at law, for about a year, when one morning, in the temporary absence of both Mr. Veeley and Mr. Carr, there came into our office a young man whose whole appearance was so indicative of haste and agitation that I involuntarily rose as he approached, and advanced to meet him.

  “What is the matter, sir?” I inquired. “You have no bad news to tell me, I hope?”

  “I have come to see Mr. Veeley; is he in?”

  “No,” I replied; “he was unexpectedly called away this morning to Washington; he cannot be home before tomorrow, but if you will make your business known to me——”

  “To you, sir?” interrupted he, turning a very cold, but steady eye on mine; then seeming to be satisfied with his scrutiny, continued: “There is no reason why I shouldn’t; my business is no secret. I came to inform him that Mr. Leavenworth is dead.”

  “Mr. Leavenworth!” I exclaimed, falling back a step. Mr. Leavenworth was an old client of our firm, to say nothing of his being the particular friend of Mr. Veeley.