Reviews for The Leavenworth Case

The average rating for The Leavenworth Case based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-10-18 00:00:00 Keith Mitchell The Dead Man in the Library If there is anything classic detective stories have ever taught us, it is this - that libraries are probably the most likely non-combat-related places for you to get killed in, with private ones being even more dangerous than those of the public order. There are probably cruel and callous people out there who would think nothing of killing a man over a book - whereas it is doubtless more romantic to kill a man over a woman -, and that's why libraries usually abound in dead bodies, and also why you should be very careful as to what books you read (especially when you are foolhardy enough to do your reading in a library). Imagine someone finding your body over a bad book - what a bad example this would set to posterity. Being found dead, or preferably alive, over Anna Katharine Green's novel The Leavenworth Case, which was published in 1878, is something I could live with (yes, I know there is something of a paradox included here), because it is a really entertaining detective novel and probably even has some literary value since Green can be seen as one of the earliest writers of detective novels. Therefore, when the wealthy businessman Horatio Leavenworth is found dead in his library, with a bullet in his head, his murderer is probably not guilty of cliché but of murder only. After all, up to 1878 there had not been too many dead bodies in libraries. The story involves two orphaned nieces, Eleanor and Mary, who were taken into the household by Mr. Leavenworth when they were children, and between whom a mysterious kind of estrangement has arisen. Can it have something to do with the fact that, due to a whim of their uncle's, only one of them is supposed to inherit the family fortune, whereas the other one is to be left out in the cold? Then there is the English gentleman Mr. Clavering, who seems to be stalking the two young ladies and who even haunts some people's dreams. And what has become of the Irish maidservant Hannah, who mysteriously disappeared in the night of the murder? These are some of the questions in this generally well-written locked-room-mystery that our narrator, the decent and tactful lawyer (it is a piece of fiction, remember!) Mr. Raymond and the wry detective Ebenezer Gryce find themselves confronted with. By the way, Ebenezer Gryce is a recurrent character in Anna Katharine Green's fiction, and one may regard him as one of the forerunners of Sherlock Holmes. After all, A Study in Scarlet was published in 1887, some ten years after Gryce had solved the Leavenworth Case and, en passant, displayed some of his quirks. Green's style reminds me of typical Victorian literature: She has a way with words, but the words also have their way with her, and all in all, it is very readable. [1] A slight demerit, though, I will not conceal, and this is Green's, or rather her narrator's tendency to idealize the Leavenworth nieces, and Eleanor in particular. But since not even Dickens, the Champion, is above such kind of sentimental folderol, Green may be forgiven these trespasses against good taste, and let's not forget: You will definitely be surprised by the solution to this murder mystery. [1] The only thing that really got on my nerves after a while was her excessive use of the expression "in regard to". This, after a while, made me jump more than any pistol shot could have done.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-09-10 00:00:00 Francis Ryan 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.