‘The Leavenworth Case’ by Anna Katharine Green: The forgotten mother of detective fiction

I’ll give any murder mystery a chance. Golden-age whodunit, gritty noir, cozy village caper – doesn’t matter. If there’s a body and a puzzle, I’ll pick it up at least once. This indiscriminate habit has led to some odd discoveries: a Turkish sci-fi noir novella, a thriller about a Korean nun solving convent crimes, a literal scratch-and-sniff murder mystery (yes, I know). Some of these I’ve happily forgotten. Others have left a longer mark, which is how I ended up reading The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katharine Green – an 1878 novel widely available today but once largely forgotten – and discovered that I was holding what turned out to be one of the genre’s founding mothers.

A runaway bestseller

Published in 1878, The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katharine Green is one of the first full-length American detective novels, and certainly the first runaway bestseller. Green, a Brooklyn-born lawyer’s daughter, wrote it in secret and submitted it under a friend’s name. It caused a sensation. People read it across the US and in England, it was pirated by multiple publishers. Wilkie Collins praised it. The Pennsylvania State Senate debated whether a woman could really have written such a cleverly constructed crime plot. It was that unusual.

Green didn’t just write a hit;...

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