The Leavenworth Case (Penguin Classics) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  BOOK I - THE PROBLEM

  CHAPTER 1 - “A Great Case”

  CHAPTER 2 - The Coroner’s Inquest

  CHAPTER 3 - Facts and Deductions

  CHAPTER 4 - A Clue

  CHAPTER 5 - Expert Testimony

  CHAPTER 6 - Side-Lights

  CHAPTER 7 - Mary Leavenworth

  CHAPTER 8 - Circumstantial Evidence

  CHAPTER 9 - A Discovery

  CHAPTER 10 - Mr. Gryce Receives New Impetus

  CHAPTER 11 - The Summons

  CHAPTER 12 - Eleanore

  CHAPTER 13 - The Problem

  BOOK II - HENRY CLAVERING

  CHAPTER 1 - Mr. Gryce at Home

  CHAPTER 2 - Ways Opening

  CHAPTER 3 - The Will of a Millionaire

  CHAPTER 4 - The Beginning of Great Surprises

  CHAPTER 5 - On The Stairs

  CHAPTER 6 - In My Office

  CHAPTER 7 - “Trueman! Trueman! Trueman!”

  CHAPTER 8 - A Prejudice

  CHAPTER 9 - Patchwork

  CHAPTER 10 - The Story of A Charming Woman

  CHAPTER 11 - A Report Followed By Smoke

  CHAPTER 12 - Timothy Cook

  CHAPTER 13 - Mr. Gryce Explains Himself

  BOOK III - HANNAH

  CHAPTER 1 - Amy Belden

  CHAPTER 2 - A Weird Experience

  CHAPTER 3 - The Missing Witness

  CHAPTER 4 - Burned Paper

  CHAPTER 5 - Q

  CHAPTER 6 - Mrs. Belden’s Narrative

  CHAPTER 7 - Unexpected Testimony

  BOOK IV - THE PROBLEM SOLVED

  CHAPTER 1 - Mr. Gryce Resumes Control

  CHAPTER 2 - Fine Work

  CHAPTER 3 - Gathered Threads

  CHAPTER 4 - Culmination

  CHAPTER 5 - A Full Confession

  CHAPTER 6 - The Outcome of A Great Crime

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE LEAVENWORTH CASE

  ANNA KATHARINE GREEN (1846–1935), often referred to as “The Mother of the Detective Novel,” was born on November 11, 1846, to Katherine Ann Whitney Green and James Wilson Green. Her mother died while Green was still young, and her father moved the family from Brooklyn to Connecticut, Albany, and finally Buffalo. At her stepmother’s urging, Green attended Ripley Female College in Vermont, where she met Ralph Waldo Emerson, with whom she later corresponded. On November 25, 1884, Green married Charles Rohlfs, an actor seven years her junior, though Green’s father forced him to give up acting before the wedding. With him she designed award-winning furniture. Her first novel, The Leavenworth Case, was published in 1878, nine years before the debut of Sherlock Holmes, and became the standard by which new detective stories were measured. She went on to publish thirty-six novels, several more of them starring Ebenezer Gryce of The Leavenworth Case, before she died in Buffalo at eighty-eight years old. She was also the creator of Amelia Butterworth, the intrepid spinster who helped inspire Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple.

  MICHAEL SIMS is the author of several nonfiction books, including Apollo’s Fire, which National Public Radio chose as one of the best science books of the year; Adam’s Navel, which was a New York Times Notable Book and a Library Journal Best Science Book; and most recently In the Womb: Animals, a companion book to a National Geographic Channel TV series. For Penguin Classics he has edited The Annotated Archy and Mehitabel ; Arsène Lupin, Gentleman-Thief; and The Penguin Book of Gaslight Crime. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, Orion, New Statesman, Chronicle of Higher Education, and many other periodicals, as well as on radio. Learn more at www.michaelsimsbooks.com.

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  First published in the United States of America by G. P. Putnam’s Sons 1878

  This edition with an introduction by Michael Sims published in Penguin Books 2010

  Introduction copyright © Michael Sims, 2010

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Green, Anna Katherine, 1846–1935.

  The Leavenworth case / Anna Katherine Green : introduction by Michael Sims.

  p. cm.—(Penguin classics)

  ISBN : 978-1-101-54977-3

  1. Sisters—Fiction. 2. Merchants—Crimes against—Fiction.

  3. Inheritance and succession—Fiction. 4. Police—New York (State)—New York—Fiction.

  5. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS2732.L4 2010

  813’.4—dc22 2009052296

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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  Introduction

  The first time I opened The Leavenworth Case, I couldn’t put it down. I had found a century-old edition in green buckram with crossed red keys embossed on the cover—nothing valuable, just a reading copy whose cloth and paper gave antique pleasure, but still not a volume I ought to hold in one hand while scrambling eggs with the other. Yet I couldn’t stop reading. I took the book with me to a doctor’s office and even read a page or two at traffic lights. I had enjoyed her later stories about the young socialite detective Violet Strange, but this was my introduction to Anna Katharine Green’s entertaining skills as a novelist. And this nineteenth-century bestseller was her first novel.

  From the opening page, the story gallops off like a runaway hansom cab. Soon readers find themselves caught up in a trial scene worthy of Perry Mason or Law & Order—a coroner’s inquest held, as was customary in the late nineteenth century, at the scene of the crime. After this surprising episode, the story grows ever trickier, with revelations and cliff-hangers galore. Green keeps the dialogue lively and mostly convincing, especially for its era. Some critics disparage her characters’ occasional florid speeches, but if outbreaks of Victorian emotion were fatal, all of Dickens’s characters would have expired long ago. Aside from her modern sense of pacing, Green draws us back to her books for all the virtues that we think of as Victorian, those that keep us returning to, say, Wilkie Collins: atmosphere, plot, color, and sheer narrative energy. Now and then her storytelling is as leisurely as you would expect from a nineteenth-century novel, but mostly the story dashes at a pa
ce that dazzled her contemporaries. She zips through many scenes like an indie film director. Watch this cinematic jump cut:

  The answer came in the shape of an envelope thrust under the door. Raising it, I found it to be a note. It was from Mr. Gryce, and ran thus:

  “Come at once; Hannah Chester is found.”

  “Hannah found?”

  “So we have reason to think.”

  “When? Where? by Whom?”

  “Sit down, and I will tell you.”

  Drawing up a chair in a flurry of hope and fear, I sat down by Mr. Gryce’s side.

  “She is not in the cupboard,” that personage exclaimed, observing without doubt how my eyes went traveling about the room in my anxiety and impatience.

  The Leavenworth Case was published in 1878, nine years before the debut of a cocky English private detective named Sherlock Holmes. Anna Katharine Green was unquestionably a pioneer, but even she was not the first woman to write a detective novel. Apparently that honor goes to American dime novelist Metta Victoria Fuller Victor, who published The Dead Letter in 1867 under the pseudonym Seeley Regester. And Regester’s novel was preceded by a story published in January 1866 in the Australian Journal—“The Dead Witness,” which appeared under the pseudonym “W. W.,” which hid the identity and gender of a young Irish-born writer named Mary Fortune.

  But Green was much the better writer of the three. Her plotting was outrageously sneaky, and her characterizations quick and often witty. The Leavenworth Case became one of the best-selling novels of the nineteenth century, launching not only the first major detective novelist—her career would span forty-five years—but also the first series of such novels about an ongoing character. Green became so well known that, during his tour of America in the 1890s, Arthur Conan Doyle sought a meeting with her.

  When Green wrote her sophisticated and confident first book, the genre was still young. Most critics cite Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 “Murders in the Rue Morgue” as the genesis of detective fiction. Of course, practically every story since Cain and Abel has included crime; and rudimentary detection shows up in, for example, Voltaire’s novel Zadig and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story “Mademoiselle de Scuderi.” But Poe brought them all together. His influences included the felony-ridden stories of French novelist Honoré de Balzac, who drew some of his own inspiration from the hawkeyed trackers in James Fenimore Cooper’s tales of American Indians. It was Poe who introduced the first private consulting detective, C. Auguste Dupin, as well as other trappings that Conan Doyle would later purloin to furnish his Sherlock Holmes adventures—an egotistical amateur, an admiring narrator, inept official police, and an outré murder. The genre reached adolescence in the detective novels that Balzac’s countryman Émile Gaboriau began publishing in 1866, several of them starring Monsieur Lecoq, based upon a real-life criminal-turned-policeman named Eugène François Vidocq. Soon after her debut, Anna Katharine Green was called the American Gaboriau.

  Ahead of the pack as usual, it was also Poe who established the now standard last scene in detective stories, a retrospective explanation by the detective that casts the story’s events in a new light. This innovation launched one of the great aesthetic pleasures of the genre: the last-minute reconfiguring of events into a second story underlying the one that you thought you were reading. From this first novel, Anna Katharine Green proved a master at such conjuring.

  In 1846, after living in Manhattan and moving to Indiana and back, a restless attorney named James Wilson Green and his pregnant wife, Katherine Ann Whitney Green, settled their three children in Brooklyn Heights, on the bluff across the East River from Manhattan. In their house opposite the Plymouth Church, Anna Catherine Green was born on November 11. Not until the age of thirty-two, when she published her first book, would she change the spelling of her middle name to more closely resemble her mother’s first name.

  Brooklyn Heights was bustling. Walt Whitman lived there and edited the Brooklyn Eagle. A decade before, the census had reported sixty-four lawyers working in Brooklyn, but James Green practiced in Manhattan near the U.S. courthouse. The Plymouth Church was the pulpit of the famous Presbyterian orator Henry Ward Beecher. Three years after arriving and immediately joining the church, the Greens would name their fifth child after Beecher—just before his church burned down. That same tragic summer, leaving three older children, a three-year-old Anna, and a newborn, Katherine Green died in a cholera epidemic. The baby lived only two more weeks, and Anna became the charge of her sixteen-year-old sister. James Green gathered his children around him and became ever more the guardian patriarch.

  He also continued his peripatetic lifestyle, taking the family to Connecticut and Albany before settling in Buffalo in 1857. Financial troubles were haunting the New York City area; thanks largely to the Erie Canal, however, Buffalo was a bustling ironand-steel town that was trying to outgrow its frontier roughness. Green prospered. While tightly controlling his children’s lives, he gave them material comforts and education. In time he married a woman who encouraged her bright stepdaughter to write down her rhymes and narratives. It was in this cold industrial town that young Anna began her habit of walking alone, reciting to herself the poems she wrote. Her older brother had a toy printing press and played publisher to her author.

  Unlike most fathers of his era, James Green sent his daughters to college, although only a few specialized universities even accepted female students at the time. In 1863, after graduating from public high school in Buffalo, Anna Green left for Poultney, Vermont, where she attended Ripley Female College, which is now Green Mountain College. At Ripley she met Ralph Waldo Emerson. She was drawn toward writing poetry, and her professors encouraged her. She became president of the Washington Irving Association, and like Irving she would set most of her writing in New York or at least in the northeastern United States. Employment was not an option for a middleclass young woman, so after graduation Green returned home—although home kept moving, to various places around New York and finally back to Brooklyn Heights. Five years after graduating, Green sent several poems to Emerson, who replied with only modest encouragement:

  [T]hey clearly indicate a good degree attained in power of expression.... I think one is to be congratulated on every degree of success of this kind.... But it is quite another question whether it is to be made a profession,—whether one may dare leave all other things behind, & write....

  Discouraged, Green looked to other avenues of expression. Her stepmother again encouraged her to write fiction. Throughout her young life, she had observed her father’s career—his remarks about courts and attorneys, his interactions with colleagues and police. Later she remembered riding in the backseat of a carriage and listening to her father chatting in the front with the police chief as their horse clopped along the streets. Gradually she began to wonder if she might write a novel along the lines of Wilkie Collins—a suspenseful tale about crime and lawyers and detectives. She began to draw upon her knowledge of her father’s profession and the wealthier people whose lives she had glimpsed, making notes toward characters and scenes, thinking about the legalities of wills and marriages. The daughter of a strong-willed father, she worked female dependence and inheritance laws into the story.

  For six long years, afraid that she would be unable to complete a novel, Anna Green worked in secret, filling school notebooks as she evolved the story that would become The Leavenworth Case. Writing with various inks and on various colored papers, working at the mountains and seashore, in Brooklyn, even on trains, she accumulated a 150,000-word manuscript that she later described as “like Joseph’s coat of many colors.” She waited until it was two-thirds complete before showing it to her father and the rest of the family. He liked it and encouraged her but also immediately assumed the role of editor, advising a number of deletions and additions. “I felt grateful to my father for his kindness in helping me,” she recalled later, “but I must confess that the way he tore some of my most cherished construction all to pieces was almost dish
eartening. However, I reconstructed and pieced together the parts which he had condemned, and set about completing my work.” He insisted that before going to a publisher, she surrender the manuscript to the critical legal eye of a judge he knew; but when the judge completed his reading, he had a single minor critique—that the author had used the word equity in a colloquial rather than a precise legal sense. She changed her wording.

  Through a contact of her father’s, the manuscript was submitted to New York publisher George Putnam, who insisted that Green cut sixty thousand words. Frustrated but eager to please, she did so, and Putnam published the book in 1878. It quickly became astonishingly popular. Later Wilkie Collins himself exclaimed over its virtues:

  Her powers of invention are so remarkable—she has so much imagination and so much belief (a most important qualification for our art) in what she says.... Dozens of times reading the story I have stopped to admire the fertility of invention, the delicate treatment of incident—and the fine perception of event on the personages of the story.

  Soon Yale assigned Green’s first novel to its law students, as a demonstration of the risks of circumstantial evidence. The book was so well known six years later, when Green married a young aspiring actor named Charles Rohlfs—who later became an acclaimed furniture designer—that Rohlfs said he felt as if he had married The Leavenworth Case. She was thirty-seven, he twenty-eight. She came from an old New England family and had become famous and wealthy; his parents were German immigrants, and he was just starting out. But in real life as in fiction, Anna Katharine Green seldom followed expectations.