The Leavenworth Case, American author Anna Katharine Green’s 1878 mystery novel (the first of more than thirty mystery novels and short story collections penned by this author), made quite a splash in its day, winning praise from the ringmaster of Victorian sensationalism, Wilkie Collins himself, and selling, so the story goes, over 750,000 copies in the decade and a half after its publication. Yet a couple generations later, at the beginning of the Golden Age of detective fiction (roughly 1920 to 1940), The Leavenworth Case had become, like a once resplendent Victorian mansion, one of those dreary and decayed landmarks on the literary landscape that people dutifully glance at before passing on to something altogether more modern and exciting. Although Leavenworth continued to stand derelict and neglected for most of the twentieth century, today industrious scholars have succeeded in restoring the novel’s reputation. A question remains, however, as to just how genuinely golden is that which now glitters.
At the height of the Golden Age of detective fiction critics (most of them, it must be allowed, men) pelted The Leavenworth Case with scornful commentary. Perusing a reprinted edition of Green’s first mystery novel in 1929, nearly three decades after he had originally read it, the great modernist writer T. S. Eliot, an avid consumer of mystery fiction who valued not only the work of the Victorian sensationalist Wilkie Collins but that of the modern detection purists like Freeman Wills Crofts, was moved to wonder why Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes “reread so much better than The Leavenworth Case?” He noted disparagingly of Leavenworth that it “is simply popping over with sentiment” and “the sentimentality throws a spotlight on every technical flaw in the plot,” making the story a failure both as a pure novel and as a mystery. In Eliot’s view Anna Katharine Green in Leavenworth had fatally allowed the basest melodrama to overwhelm the novel’s detective interest.
At about the same time T. S. Eliot was looking back at Leavenworth and shuddering, the novelist and critic Arthur Bennett, in contrast with Eliot no fan of modern detective fiction, was taking a similar literary stroll down memory lane and reaching the same repulsed conclusion. Bennett likewise had read Leavenworth in his younger days. “I could remember nothing of The Leavenworth Case except that it gave me, as a youth, immense enjoyment,” Bennett wrote. “Now, in maturity,” he reflected sadly, “I have read it with difficulty; indeed I only got through it by the exercise of steely determination.” Bennett condemned both the “long-windedness and marked clumsiness of the narrative” and particularly “the inflated, maladroit and frequently ungrammatical style, especially in the dialogue, which is plenteous.” Again recalling T. S. Eliot, Bennett also argued that there was “little or no mystery” in Leavenworth, “for the reason that the book is soaked in sentimentality.” The author too obviously played favorites with the characters, in other words.
A few years later, in 1931, the English literary scholar H. Douglas Thomson took a look at Leavenworth in his Masters of Mystery: A Study of the Detective Story, the first book-length history of the detective fiction genre, and saw a literary edifice every bit as ungainly and unappealing as the one earlier decried by Eliot and Bennett. “The detection is singularly elementary,” he observed damningly. “The plot is hopelessly drawn out, and the melodrama is a sample of unnatural and stilted writing.”
By the 1940s, critical opinion had not altered. In his genre history Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story (1941), the American mystery critic Howard Haycraft deemed Green’s literary style “unbelievably stilted and melodramatic by modern standards” and “her characterization forced and artificial.” Similarly, in 1945 correspondence the great (and reliably snarky) hard-boiled crime writer Raymond Chandler damned Leavenworth with a terse pronouncement that naturally never found its way into the book’s blurbs: “Read it for laughs, if you haven’t [read it].”
It should be noted that some Golden Age women mystery writers held a much different opinion on this subject (not to mention others) from Raymond Chandler. The Queen of Classic Crime, Agatha Christie, fondly remembered Green’s landmark mystery, having read it, like T. S. Eliot and Arnold Bennett, at a young age. Similarly, another Golden Age woman crime writer, American Virginia Rath (1905-1950)—whose mysteries, though of course vastly less well known than Christie’s, are being reprinted—acknowledged Green’s childhood influence on her, recalling that while there had been “few books” at her family’s ranch in Colusa County, California there providentially were to be found on the shelves there some of Green’s detective novels, which she promptly “absorbed.” Another American crime writer from the period, the once very popular Carolyn Wells (1862-1942), was prompted to try her hand at detective fiction after devoutly reading Green as an adult.
However, even as late as 1972, with academic gender studies looming on the horizon, the English crime writer and critic Julian Symons in his influential genre study, Bloody Murder: A History from the Detective Story to the Crime Novel, evidently felt perfectly comfortable echoing earlier criticism in his discussion of Leavenworth, dismissing the novel as “drearily sentimental” and “extremely feeble [as a story].” Echoing Arnold Bennett he grumbled that “there are passages of pious moralizing which are pulled through only with the most dogged persistence.” Not surprisingly, considering this dampening critical downpour of over a half-century’s duration, when The Leavenworth Case was reprinted in a modern edition by Dover Press in 1981, genre scholar Michele Slung pronounced that the novel’s author was “virtually unread today.”
Yet finally the storm was beginning to break, so that one could dimly discern glimmers of a more kindly light on the critical horizon. In 1989 Popular Press published Patricia D. Maida’s Mother of Detective Fiction: The Life and Works of Anna Katharine Green. A decade later, in 1998, Catherine Ross Nickerson gave Leavenworth and Anna Katharine Green much serious consideration in her book The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women, published by Duke University Press; while in 2003, Duke University Press republished, in one volume, two long out-of-print Green novels, That Affair Next Door and Lost Man’s Lane, with an introduction by Professor Nickerson. The Leavenworth Case itself reappeared in 2010, in a winsome new guise: an attractive commercial edition put out by Penguin Classics, with an introduction by noted author Michael Sims. Finally, the next year keen genre scholar Lucy Sussex included a chapter on Green in Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction: The Mothers of the Mystery Genre, a noteworthy genre study published by Palgrave Macmillan. Two more decades had elapsed, but finally friendly rays of critical approval were shining down most warmly on Leavenworth.
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How far we have come from the critical opinion of eight decades ago! When reviewing the 2010 Penguin reissue of The Leavenworth Case, Publishers Weekly even went so far as to praise the novel for Anna Katharine Green’s “smooth prose”—a characterization that calls to mind, in reference to T. S. Eliot and Arnold Bennett, the phrase “turning over in his grave.” To be sure, Leavenworth is a landmark mystery, a tale that helped establish, as Michael Sims in his lucid and persuasive introduction to the novel outlines, numerous mystery tropes. Yet it seems to me that the earlier twentieth-century criticism of Leavenworth still carries force at least as concerns the matter of Green’s cumbrous writing style.
The Leavenworth Case details the police investigation into the shooting slaying of wealthy Horatio Leavenworth in the library of his great mansion. The net of suspicion entangles the murdered magnate’s two beautiful nieces, Mary and Eleanore, and the frenzied emotional thrashing of this duo of imperiled damsels tends to make a mess of Green’s allegedly “smooth prose,” turning it into something more resembling the stiffest treacle. Here, for example, is Eleanore Leavenworth speaking in what might be termed, in keeping with the times, high dudgeon:
“To accuse me,” she murmured; “me, me!” striking her breast with her clenched hand, “who loved the very ground he trod upon; who would have cast my own body between him and the deadly bullet if I had only known his danger.”
“Oh!” she cried, “it is not a slander that they utter, but a dagger which they thrust into my heart!”
And Eleanore is, as they say, just getting warmed up here. More histrionic yet is the scene where she lays her cheek against her dead uncle’s “pallid brow” and then kisses his “clay-cold lips,” in order to demonstrate her absolute innocence of his foul murder. I doubt whether this morbid exhibition would have held sway in any court in the land, but to Eleanore it is proof positive of her moral purity:
“Could I do that if I were guilty? Would not the breath freeze on my lips, the blood congeal in my veins, and my heart faint as this contact? Son of a father loved and reverenced [Eleanore here is addressing the male narrator of the novel], can you believe me to be a woman stained with crime when I do this?”
The narrator informs us that when Eleanore performs this melodramatic harangue she wears an expression that “no material touch could paint, not tongue describe”—which, happily, saves the author the trouble of having to describe it.
Eleanore’s antics continue in this vein, each heartfelt “Oh!” flying like the fatal bullet she absolutely insists she did not fire into the body of Horatio Leavenworth. For her part Mary Leavenworth, every bit as rhetorically florid as her cousin, apparently attended the same class in Egregiously Excessive Elocution:
“I know who would be the greatest losers by it [Horatio Leavenworth’s death]. The children he took to his bosom in their helplessness and sorrow; the young girls he enshrined with his halo of love and protection, when love and protection was what their immaturity and youth most demanded; the women who looked to him for guidance when girlhood and youth were passed—these, sir, these are the ones to whom his death is a loss, in comparison to which all others which may hereafter befall them must ever seem trivial and unimportant.”
One gets the impression that the ladies Leavenworth must sit up half the night industriously composing such speeches as their next day’s Dramatic Utterances. It is certainly hard to believe that such effusions come strictly off the cuff.
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Much of the aesthetic impulse behind the Golden Age of detective fiction was an attempt to blow the dust off the genre that had accumulated over many prior decades from fusty triple-decker Victorian sensation novels (authored by women and men alike), which were about as appealing to the rollicking mystery readers of the Roaring Twenties as an aspidistra at the cocktail bar. Admittedly, T. S. Eliot and Dorothy L. Sayers afforded Wilkie Collins great praise, but for much of the Golden Age death as portrayed in the detective novel was a game, a puzzle to be solved (or not) over a pleasantly relaxing evening. What death emphatically was not was a lengthy emotional melodrama for the reader to fret over at leisure, installment by installment. People had experienced quite enough of that sort of thing after having endured four years of habitation in the great charnel house of the First World War.
What death emphatically was not was a lengthy emotional melodrama for the reader to fret over at leisure, installment by installment.To be sure, in the latter part of the Golden Age, during the 1930s, Dorothy L. Sayers, having become bored with “mere puzzles,” began advocating a return to the literary standards of the nineteenth century, when mystery and melodrama had a place in the “serious” novel, albeit of the more sensationalist sort. Yet the revival of such Victorian-era writers as Anna Katharine Green, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Ellen (Mrs. Henry) Wood, then seen as markedly inferior to Wilkie Collins (and, to a lesser extent, Sheridan Le Fanu), was some considerable time in coming. Sayers herself like Eliot elevated Collins far above Braddon and Wood, asking dismissively, if something less than presciently, of the latter pair of authors: “[Wood’s] East Lynne and [Braddon’s] Lady Audley’s Secret made in their day as great a stir as [Collin’] The Woman in White, but who to-day would put any money on the chance of their survival in literary histories?”
As for Green, T. S. Eliot argued that the American author plainly lacked Wilkie Collins’ writing ability. Like Collins, Green promised human interest in her mystery fiction, but unlike Collins she had not the ability to deliver on that promise. While a writer like Wilkie Collins, possessing “a wider gift for drama and fiction,” could successfully combine in one mystery novel an intriguing puzzle with a heavy dose of human interest, Anna Katharine Green, who had not the manifold literary gifts of a Wilkie Collins, could only sadly slip when she tried to do the same. “It is here that Mrs. Green failed,” declared Eliot. “She did not realize that unless one can create permanent human beings, one had better leave one’s figures as sketchy as possible.”
Unlike Freeman Wills Crofts and S. S. Van Dine, two of the most popular—and strictly puzzle-oriented—detective novelists of the Jazz Age, Green had “no firm control” over her mystery making ability. “Possibly,” Eliot speculated austerely, “the public [in Green’s time] was not educated up to [Crofts’] The Cask or [Van Dine’s] The Benson Murder Case.” Even Wilkie Collins, who, in contrast with the later generation of writers herein quoted, had highly praised The Leavenworth Case, delicately observed of the novel’s author that “Miss Green has capacities for presenting ‘character’ which she has not yet sufficiently cultivated.” One can safely conclude that, in the eyes of critics like Eliot, Sayers, Chandler and Symons (if not mystery writers like Christie, Rath and Wells), Green never did sufficiently cultivate these capacities.
Today, however, the Victorian sensation novel has seen a great resurgence in popularity, both among academics and the broader fiction reading public. One theory that attempts to explain this shift posits that after World War Two mystery writers and readers alike increasingly lost faith in the hopeful if arid vision afforded by the ordered rationalism found in classic detective fiction, where a dispassionate Great Detective is always conveniently on hand to bring truth to light and explain the seemingly inexplicable, all with a happy minimum of fuss. Whatever the explanation, however, extravagant melodrama and effusive exhibition of emotions now are embraced, rather than shunned; and no one is embarrassed to be caught perusing the pages of East Lynne or The Leavenworth Case—or, indeed, devoting learned monographs to the study of such novels. To the contrary, it is reading and ratiocinating sober puzzle-oriented detective novels like The Red Thumb Mark, The Cask or The Benson Murder Case for which the modern mystery reader is more likely to feel the need to offer hasty, shamefaced disclaimers.
