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Mother of Detective Fiction
The Life and Works of Anna Katharine Green
Patricia D. Maida
University of Wisconsin Press, 1989
When The Leavenworth Case, Anna Katharine Green’s first novel, was published in 1878, it quickly became a bestseller as well as a seminal work of detective fiction. Critics were to perceive Green’s work as the link to Edgar Allan Poe in the American line of classic detective fiction. But the development of serial detectives is perhaps her greatest achievement. (Ebenezer Gryce of the New York Metropolitan Police, who makes his first appearance in 1878, precedes Sherlock Holmes by almost a decade.)
    In examining the life and works of Anna Katharine Green, one discovers a slice of American life: in the social events of New York City, in the plight of young working women, in the moral dilemmas of upright citizens pursuing the American dream.
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front cover of That Affair Next Door and Lost Man's Lane
That Affair Next Door and Lost Man's Lane
Anna Katharine Green
Duke University Press, 2003
Anna Katharine Green was the most famous and prolific writer of detective fiction in the United States prior to Dashiell Hammett. Her first novel, The Leavenworth Case, was the bestseller of 1878. Green is credited with a number of “firsts” within the mystery genre, including the gentleman murdered as he makes out his will and the icicle as murder weapon. She created the first female detectives in American fiction. Her amateur spinster sleuth, Amelia Butterworth, became the prototype for numerous women detectives to follow, including Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. Nosy, opinionated, and tenacious, Amelia Butterworth engages in a sustained rivalry with Ebenezer Gryce, a police detective. In the interaction between these characters, Green developed two more conventions adopted by future generations of mystery writers: the investigation as battle between the sexes and between the professional and the unexpectedly sharp, observant amateur. This volume presents two of Green’s Amelia Butterworth tales: That Affair Next Door (1897) and Lost Man’s Lane (1898).
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