The Dead Letter

Description

An 1866 novel, The Dead Letter: An American Romance, transcribed by Metta Victoria Fuller Victor with the pen name, Seeley Regester, is attributed by annalist of faddish literary works to be the first comprehensive US detective prose. The work is sensational in areas and covers suppositions quintessential of the time, nonetheless, it is an enchanting, first case in history of the literary category. The story is about Richard Redfield, an employee in the Dead Letter Office, reading an unspecified letter. When he browsed through the letter, he believed that the missive pertains to the incidents of a time when 2 years earlier when someone was ruthlessly killed.

Metta Victoria Fuller Victor wrote under the pseudonym Seeley Regester was a United States writer, attributed with writing the first crime fiction in America. She made over 100 snitch narratives, trailblazing the arena.

She was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, the 3rd of 5 kids of Adonijah Fuller and Lucy Williams Fuller. The family settled at Wooster, Ohio in 1839, where she and her older sister Frances – who also turned to be a popular novelist – went into a seminary for women; they both produced tales in local periodicals and, then, in the Home Journal. The sisters stayed in New York City, where they kept on writing more novels.

Metta tied the knot with editor and issuing forerunner Orville James Victor, a sibling of her sister Frances’ husband. She became an editor for the Beadle & Company monthly Home and for Cosmopolitan Art Journal, and then publishing as an unknown author of snitch narratives for her husband’s sequels for Beadle.

Her notable opuses are Alice Wilde, the primary dime novel; Maum Guinea, and Her Plantation “Children”, connoting abolitionist penchants; The Dead Letter, the first comprehensive US detective novel, The Figure Eight; A Bad Boy’s Diary; and The Blunders of a Bashful Man.
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