The Leavenworth Case

Description

The Leavenworth Case is the first novel by Anna Katharine Green and a masterpiece that instantly established the young author as one of the finest writers of detective stories.

The story begins in New York, with the murder of Horatio Leavenworth, a retired old merchant in his own home. The murder gives the start signal to an avalanche of events and to a complicated plot with a lot of mysteries that take a really brilliant brain to decipher. The brilliant brain in this case is one of Green’s favorite detectives, Ebenezer Gryce (the other was Amelia Butterworth, the prototype of the spinster detective) who is not the chief investigator in the case, but had it not been for him, the case would have never been solved.

Besides the complicated plot and the complex characters, The Leavenworth Case amazes with its legal accuracy – another feature that make Anna Katherine Green’s stories so special. Green always went the extra mile to carry out the research for making the cases in her stories plausible and the solutions realistic, so much so that her stories were used by prestigious law schools such as Yale to demonstrate to students how risky it can be to base arguments on circumstantial evidence.

The Leavenworth Case was also a much debated piece at the time it was published in 1878, but not for the legal procedures it presents – the Pennsylvania Senate initiated a debate to discuss whether such an excellent detective story could have been written by a woman indeed.

Anna Katharine Green was certainly a trail blazer and The Leavenworth Case is a groundbreaking book. Published more than a decade before Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes and being frequently mentioned as example and inspiration by Agatha Christie, The Leavenworth Case makes an extraordinary read to fans and not-yet-fans alike.
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