The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katharine Green

Rinehart’s The Bat featured a costumed villain, which Batman creator Bob Kane cites as one of his inspirations, and was also one of the earliest examples of an audiobook-aka talking book recording-in 1933.Īlso worth checking out is her novella The Buckled Bag, which manages to entertain and intrigue over the course of a brisk seventy-page read.

Mary Roberts Rinehart picked up the torch some thirty years after Green, publishing dozens of mysteries and earning the title of “the American Agatha Christie,” even though she was writing over a decade before Christie’s debut. See also: The Leavenworth Case: The Most Popular Mystery Novel You've Never Read And, he does manage to stay several steps ahead of the narrator, a young lawyer who takes it upon himself to assist in the investigation of the wealthy Horatio Leavenworth's murder in the hopes of exonerating the beautiful (but possibly murderous) niece of the deceased. This book predates both Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie, and it's a worthwhile read to see how Green's novel (which was a bestseller in its time) influenced the evolving mystery genre. While the actual detective-Ebenezer Gryce-isn't much of a presence throughout most of the narrative, he's quite memorable when he is on the page.

Inspect the list below to find any number of overlooked gems that deserve a second look.Įdgar Allen Poe wrote the first detective story by an American author-but the first detective novel was the work of Anna Katharine Green, with 1878’s The Leavenworth Case. If you were investigating the case of the modern crime novel-scouring its pages for prints, swabbing carefully to get a read on its DNA-you might expect the trail of its origins to lead back to the usual suspects: Dupin and Holmes, Poirot and Marple, Spenser and Sam Spade. But this literary genealogy is incomplete without the inclusion of the women (many of them not named Agatha Christie) who helped shape the genre but haven't commanded lasting literary attention. Women crime writers have always been influential in the world of mysteries, and here are a few who may be less familiar to even a dedicated reader. But she wasn’t the only woman on the scene-nor the first. Any mystery lover knows how significant Agatha Christie is to the crime-fiction genre.

The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katharine Green