The Leavenworth Case was written Anna Katherine Green. Green (1846-1935) is known today as “the Mother of Detective Fiction.” She was not the first American female author of mysteries (see: The Dead Letter), but her The Leavenworth Case was a bestseller, and Green was not only the best-known female mystery author of the nineteenth century, she was the most financially successful female mystery authors of the century.

Ebenezer Gryce, the protagonist of The Leavenworth Case, went on to star in twelve sequels. Gryce is an average Victorian detective. He is a police detective in New York City who privately employs several agents to do his legwork and act as stalking horses, including the cryptic Q, who uses business cards with question marks on them. Created before Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes (see: The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries), Gryce is more human and realistic than Holmes. Gryce is intelligent, well-educated when it come to criminals and their ways, and a clever, hard working detective, but he is not brilliant and is no Great Detective. Gryce is realistic enough to know that “sometimes an absolutely uninitiated mind will intuitively catch at something which the most highly trained intellect will miss,”¹ and to welcome observations from those sources. Gryce does not scoff and sneer at the observations of his assistants, whether they are Mr. Raymond, in The Leavenworth Case, or Amelia Butterworth (see The Amelia Butterworth Mysteries), another of Green’s series detectives: “Not...but that a word from you now and then would be welcome. I am not an egotist. I am open to suggestions....”² While Gryce can be sarcastic toward his assistants and displays great confidence in his deductions, he is not cocky. He is clever and up-to-date on modern innovations, including the use of disguises and having his agents use ciphers when sending telegrams to him, but he has a major failing, which he freely admits to: he cannot impersonate gentlemen. He is a creature of the middle classes and despite great efforts is unable to fool the upper classes when he pretends to be one of them.

Gryce is “not the thin, wiry individual with a shrewd eye that seems to plunge into the core of your being and pounce at once upon its hidden secret...Mr. Gryce was a portly, comfortable personage with an eye that never pounced, that did not even rest–on you.”³ He is in his mid-seventies and occasionally suffers from rheumatism. In Green’s later novels Gryce becomes a mentor to Green’s other series detectives, including Amelia Butterworth, Violet Strange, and Caleb Sweetwater.

The Leavenworth Case was a bestseller when it first appeared, though whether or not it was the first American bestseller depends on how the term “bestseller” is defined. The novel caused some debate on the floor of the Pennsylvania Senate; readers had a hard time believing that it could have been written by a woman. Green influenced later mystery writers, including Agatha Christie, and was well-regarded for several decades after The Leavenworth Case’s debut. And yet the modern reader is likely to find that The Leavenworth Case and the other Ebenezer Gryce novels have not aged well and are not compellingly written, and that their appeal is elusive at best.

Green’s work is not technically bad. Her plots are skillfully constructed and her novels include plenty of actual detecting and investigating. Her books include reproductions of hand-written notes and newspaper articles, and her novels often have non-mystery subplots, such as the love story which dominates The Leavenworth Case. The Leavenworth Case includes a number of elements which would later become genre conventions: a dead body found in a library, a wealthy man about to change his will, a locked room murder, a sketch of the crime scene, and a partially burned letter. Green’s narrative style is straightforward and unadorned.

But for a poet Green produces surprisingly lifeless prose. There is never a sense of the characters coming to life, of the characters possessing the spark which separates Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes from Arthur Morrison’s Martin Hewitt (see: The Martin Hewitt Mysteries). Green’s language is formal and stiff and her descriptions are ordinary. The dialogue often verges on the shrill, and her characterization, especially in the romance subplot, is histrionic and melodramatic. Green’s pacing is astoundingly bad; the coroner’s inquest sequence in The Leavenworth Case goes on for dozens of pages and sucks all the momentum out of the book. She is also is prey to the occasionally badly-written sentence. She was influenced in several ways by Émile Gaboriau (see: The Lerouge Affair), from the use of multimedia elements to long flashbacks to the puzzle plots to the realistic approach to police work, but Green regrettably did not copy Gaboriau’s basic readability.

To Green’s credit, her books do have occasionally interesting features. Although the coroner’s inquest sequence in The Leavenworth Case is a narrative train wreck, it does give a glimpse into how such things were done in the 1870s. The Leavenworth Case would go on to be used at Yale University’s Law School as “a demonstration of the risks of circumstantial evidence.”⁴

There is also a gay subtext in The Leavenworth Case, as there is in much of Green’s work.

Her female characters form close attachments, and are impressed by each other's beauty. Her male characters similarly evaluate and note each other's looks. The scenes in Leavenworth where Mr. Raymond tries, for detectival purposes, to make friends with Henry Clavering have the feel of an attempted romantic liaison. It is hard to tell if this effect is deliberate, or an unintended side effect of Green, as a woman, writing from the point of view of male and female characters. When Mr. Gryce, as narrator, starts rhapsodizing about the other male characters' looks in "The Doctor", is he just speaking for the author, who is female, and who (perhaps) noticed such things? Or is he in his own character? Or is Green just trying to create as much romantic feeling as possible, by emphasizing the good looks of all her characters? This could simply be a Nineteenth Century romance convention. Still, interpreted literally, Green's tales have a gay feel. It adds to their unusual point of view, especially when compared to today's fiction.

Amelia Butterworth, in her debut case That Affair Next Door (1897), describes herself as being influenced by a woman's beauty, in the same way that men respond to it. She ascribes this to "something masculine in my nature" (Chapter 24). Butterworth is the original, prototypical spinster sleuth in detective fiction. It is startling to see her described as being sexually attracted to women, and in such explicit terms. Butterworth's masculine gender personality, and her gay romantic feelings, are an integral part of the characterization of spinster sleuth. The book's finale (Chapter 42) also deals with this side of Butterworth.

Sweetwater in Agatha Webb (1899), his origin novel, is deeply in love with an older man. Sweetwater will show up in later Green novels as a continuing detective character. More male-male relationships pop up in The Circular Study. Gryce talks of "adopting" the young, male, police detective, Sweetwater, "into his heart and home". He admires Sweetwater's detectival abilities, even though his looks are ordinary and plain. Later, both Gryce and Sweetwater discuss the supreme good looks of another male character in the book. In another male-male relation in The Circular Study, the murder victim's manservant has a deep attachment to the victim, and was "jealous" of the victim's falling in love with the heroine. Much is made of this jealousy as a plot element, but the idea that a man can be in love with another man, and jealous of his other relations, is simply accepted as a matter of course. Green seems to be in another world from Twentieth Century detective novelists, one in which same-sex relations are accepted much more casually than later.

Same sex relations in Green seem to involve two groups of people. One is the detective heroes themselves. Miss Amelia Butterworth, Green's prototypical spinster sleuth, is a lesbian. Mr. Gryce's adoption of Sweetwater, Mr. Raymond's pursuit of the handsome Henry Clavering are key examples. One might also add here Q's disguise as a woman in The Leavenworth Case. The second group of people in same sex relations are servants and other lower class people who fall in love with their masters. The country woman who is so devoted to Mary Leavenworth, and Joseph's devotion to his master in, are examples of this. It is possible that this relationship was more acceptable to Green's readers, because they liked the idea that the lower classes were slavishly devoted to the upper. Perhaps the same sex aspect of these relationships were simply invisible to Green's 19th Century readers, who saw only the political, class relationship aspect. Be that as it may, it certainly seems very striking today.⁵

Lastly, there is a distinctive class consciousness to the novels. Gryce is acutely aware of his middle-class status and is always conscious of being excluded, both as a person and as a detective, from upper-class society.

¹ Anna Katherine Green, The Leavenworth Case (New York: Putnam, 1878), 7.

² Green, The Leavenworth Case, 129.

³ Green, The Leavenworth Case, 6.

⁴ Michael Sims, “Introduction,” in The Leavenworth Case (New York, Penguin, 2010), xiii-xiv.

⁵ Mike Grost, “Gay Relationships in Green,” A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection, accessed Oct. 30, 2018, http://mikegrost.com/green.htm#Green.