The Leavenworth Case Book

Such a satisfying story! Nothing at all is as it seems here, making for great mystery reading. Another book I'm very, very happy to have read. Ahhhhhhhh.

Let me say the following to anyone who might be thinking of reading this book: There is a very good reason I don't read GR reviews before starting a book, and this time my reasoning proved sound -- after finishing this novel, I cruised through the reviews here, and discovered that there is one person writing about this book who gave away the whole show in the first paragraph and another who came close. I'm still shaking my head over why people do this without noting spoilers, but what can you do? Just don't go looking through the reviews here if you want to be surprised.

No look back at early crime/detective/mystery fiction would be complete without talking about The Leavenworth Case, which is a true landmark in the genre. In this book the author introduces the first American series detective, Ebenezer Gryce, of the New York Metropolitan Police force, who would go on to be involved in eleven more cases. But it is also, as Kate Watson notes in her book Women Writing Crime Fiction, 1860-1880,

"innovative in the introduction of a number of a number of themes and tropes, now familiar to the reader of crime fiction, but then new and exciting. The Leavenworth Case is original in its deployment of ballistics, science, medicine, and a coroner's inquest, the illustration of the crime scene, replica letters, and the inclusion of the locked room mystery. There is a diagram of the murder scene and the layout of the library, hall and bedroom, a ploy familiar to modern readers of the Golden Age detective fiction of Agatha Christie. While some of these elements had appeared in earlier criminography, the way in which Green cleverly combines them locates her text as the forerunner of what Knight has called the clue-puzzle mystery." (122)

In short, The Leavenworth Case occupies a sort of transitional space -- here we find a beginning in the movement toward the form taken by more modern mystery/crime/detective fiction. And by the way, Sherlock Holmes hasn't appeared on the scene yet and won't for nearly a decade, but as Watson tells us, "In the wake of Green, women writing crime became almost commonplace in America," listing several women authors, many of them now faded into the fabric of obscurity, who went on to contribute "to the form after The Leavenworth Case." (130)

This book is a true whodunit, and unlike my bad luck with modern crime novels, I had absolutely no clue as to the identity of the murderer until the very end. There is much to enjoy about this book -- a preponderance of clues that slowly appear, several people with motive to do away with the deceased, and a number of secrets to be unlocked as the story goes along. And then there are the numerous themes that Green works into her narrative, for example, as Michael Sims notes in his introduction, "female dependence and inheritance laws;" an examination of class constraints are also obvious here. If you enjoy books that turn on secrets then this a good one; I'm someone who just loves this sort of thing. I will admit that the reluctance of the characters to spill what they know got a bit frustrating after a time, and I will also say that some readers unfamiliar with writing during this period might become tired of the rather florid writing style in parts or the more melodramatic aspects of the story that crop up here and there. But in the long run, I found it to be a fine mystery, one I couldn't put down.