The Dead Letter: An American Romance was written by “Seeley Regester” and first appeared in Beadle’s Monthly (Jan-Sept 1866). “Seeley Regester” was the pseudonym of Mrs. Metta Victoria Fuller Victor (1831-1885), an American author of poetry, romance, cookbooks, humor, adventure, and mystery novels. Victor was prolific and commercially successful, but today is remembered only for The Dead Letter, which was the first American detective novel.

In The Dead Letter Henry Moreland, a handsome young New York banker, is murdered as he walks to the home of his fiancée, Eleanor Argyll. Henry was not robbed, and there is no obvious motive for the murders. The only suspects the police turn up are a dark, mysterious stranger who rode in the same car as Henry and got off at the same station, and a Leesy Sullivan, a young seamstress. Eleanor’s father also discovers that $2000 in bank notes has been stolen from his desk at home, but neither he nor the police connect this theft to Henry’s murder. Seeing that the police are unable to solve the case, Mr. Burton is sent for. He is a private detective who is called in on particularly difficult cases. Advising Burton on the case are James Argyll, Eleanor’s cousin, and Richard Redfield, the son of Mr. Argyll’s best friend; both are in love with Eleanor and are in competition for a partnership at Mr. Argyll’s law firm. Mr. Burton makes no progress in discovering the identity of the mysterious stranger but becomes convinced that Leesy Sullivan is innocent. Burton’s investigation falters, as he has found no other suspects. Thanks to accusations by James Argyll Mr. Argyll suspects Redfield of the theft and dismisses him from the law firm, giving the partnership to James and clearing the way for James to marry Mary Argyll, the younger Argyll daughter. Mr. Burton drops the case at Mr. Argyll’s request.

No longer able to practice as a lawyer, Richard takes a job as a postal clerk in the Dead Letter Office in Washington, D.C. Two years later he finds a dead letter which he believes will help find the real murderer. He shows it to Mr. Burton, who reads its clues and, using his ability at handwriting analysis, deduces that the man who wrote it is the murderer, a man “bad, from instinct, inheritance, and bringing-up.”¹ With the help of the information in the letter Mr. Burton finds the murder weapon, whose monogram helps them to identify the murderer. Richard meanwhile proves that the killer was the man who cashed the bank notes stolen from Mr. Argyll’s desk, thus establishing a link between the robbery and the murder. When Mr. Burton confronts the murderer, the man reveals that he was hired to kill Henry by James Argyll so that James could marry into the Argyll family and use their money to pay off his gambling debts. Burton accuses James in front of the Argyll family, and he confesses and accepts banishment from the country. Richard is taken back into the Argyll family and marries Mary. Eventually Mr. Burton is murdered and Richard and Mary adopt Mr. Burton’s clairvoyant daughter Lenore, who aided her father in the investigation.

Although Anna Katherine Green (see: The Amelia Butterworth Mysteries, The Leavenworth Case) was for several decades called the “Mother of Detective Fiction” by critics and historians, it is Victor who deserves the title. The Dead Letter is not, like Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, a mystery novel with heavy sensation novel elements, although it shares with the sensation novels the intrusion of crime into middle-class life. The Dead Letter is clearly a detective novel, with the puzzle plot of the mystery short story extended to novel length and the usual format of the detective novel—crime, investigation by a detective, solution—and the usual narrative focus of the detective novel—on the investigation—used. In addition to writing the first American detective novel, Victor also anticipated future amateur detectives. Mr. Burton cannot be called a model for them, as the influence of The Dead Letter was minimal (certainly nothing compared to Anna Katherine Green’s novels), but Burton anticipates the amateur detectives of the twentieth century. His character is a departure from previous detectives, neither an aristocratic recluse, like Poe’s Dupin (see: The C. Auguste Dupin Mysteries), nor a hard-boiled policeman of the streets like the casebook detectives, nor a cheerful, working class policeman, like Dickens’ Inspector Bucket (see: Bleak House). Burton is an independently wealthy gentleman who, out of personal convictions, investigates crimes. He is a former businessman, has a child that he loves, regularly works with the police, and does not accept payment.

The Dead Letter has aged far better than many other detective novels from this era. Victor’s style will be more appealing to modern reader than that of Anna Katherine Green. The Dead Letter is not Art or even great fiction, but it will hold the reader’s attention. Victor did not rely too much on coincidence, sentiment, or obviousness. The plot is good by the standards of pre-Arthur Conan Doyle (See: The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries) mystery writing, and the style is unencumbered by the stiffness common to all too many mid-century detective novels. The characterization is more than adequate and there are several vividly described scenes. One flaw is the occasional use of trite Gothic and sensation motifs, including as Eleanor’s grief over Henry’s death leading to her insanity, Mr. Burton’s gaze, similar to the Gothic glare of many Hero-Villains, and Lenore’s clairvoyance. Additionally, the decision to let James Argyll flee the country rather than accept due punishment for the murder of Henry Moreland may strike some modern readers as unjust. The Dead Letter is very much a novel of middle-class Victorian morality, similar to that of the domestic novel with its use of the solidly middle-class Mr. Burton and its approval of his mores, including his declaration that

¼I would give all the gold I have in bank to clear this matter up before that marriage takes place. Should that once be consummated before we are satisfied with our investigations, I shall drop them forever.²

Dropping the case forever, after the husband had slept with the bride, despite the husband’s guilt, would be done to save the feelings and the respectability of the Argyll family by letting James Argyll elude punishment. Victor’s readers might have approved of the latter decision, but modern readers will not.

Mr. Burton is a capable detective. He is well-schooled in many areas of crime-solving, including breaking ciphers, and is an expert at “chirography,” or handwriting analysis, “reading men and women from a specimen of their handwriting.” He has a magnetic gaze which seems to look directly into others’ souls. He is good at following others, unseen. And he is sensitive to atmosphere, always knowing when he is in the presence of evil men and women. In addition to his intellect he has an almost superhuman skill at deduction:

The more he called into play the peculiar faculties of his mind, which made him so successful a hunter on the paths of the guilty, the more marvelous became their development. He was like an Indian on the trail of his enemy the bent grass, the broken twig, the evanescent dew which, to the uninitiated, were “trifles light as air,” to him were “proofs strong as Holy Writ.”

In this work he was actuated by no pernicious motives. Upright and humane, with a generous heart which pitied the innocent injured, his conscience would allow him no rest if he permitted crime, which he could see walking where others could not, to flourish unmolested in the sunshine made for better uses.³

Although The Dead Letter was the first American detective novel, it did not appear in a vacuum.

¼between the 1860s and the 1920s the detective novel flourished in the United States—in the hands of women writers. Metta Fuller Victor was the first writer, male or female, to produce full-length detective novels in the United States with the publication of The Dead Letter in 1867 and The Figure Eight in 1869. Those novels, which blended several popular genres with the central plot of murder and its investigation, influenced other writers, especially Anna Katharine Green, who was the most successful author of detective novels in the postbellum period. Green in turn influenced many women writers, creating an identifiable tradition of women’s detective fiction that extends well into the twentieth century. The close association of that tradition with an earlier body of popular women’s writing, the domestic novel of the 1850s, produced a style we can call domestic detective fiction because of its distinctive interest in moral questions regarding family, home, and women’s experience.⁴

The great majority of American mystery narratives published before The Dead Letter were in short story form (as opposed to novella form), following the examples laid down by Edgar Allen Poe.

As the brevity of Poe’s stories suggests, he first conceived the detective story, for all its structural sophistication, as a concentrated form. Victor brought a very different aesthetic to the story of criminal investigation, that of the popular woman’s novel of the nineteenth century. The style of domestic fiction includes a more leisurely pace, with the narrator’s voice lingering over details of setting, dress, behavior, and, most importantly, emotion. Structurally, Victor’s two detective novels have the same doubled narrative as Poe’s stories, but they also include subplots and narratorial devices that delay the unfolding of the investigation narrative considerably¼in Victor’s hands, the detective story becomes a more moral form, shaped by the domestic novel’s interest in sentiment and in the problems of the middle-class home.⁵

The Dead Letter is recommended reading for anyone interested in the evolution of mystery fiction in the United States.

Print: Metta Victoria Fuller Victor, The Dead Letter: An American Romance. Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2007.

Laura Elizabeth Perrings, “Spirited Detection: Science and the Supernatural in Victorian Detective Fiction.” PhD diss.,Texas A&M University, 2016.

¹ Metta Victoria Fuller Victor, The Dead Letter, an American Romance (New York: Beadle and Company, 1866), 206.

² Victor, The Dead Letter, 227.

³ Victor, The Dead Letter, 69.

⁴ Catherine Ross Nickerson, “Introduction,” in Metta Fuller Victor and Catherine Ross Nickerson, The Dead Letter and The Figure Eight (Durham, NC: Duke University, 2003), 1.

⁵ Nickerson, “Introduction,” 3-4.