[re-release] Anna Katharine Green

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This is a re-release of an episode that originally aired May 3, 2022.

In this episode, Brook and Sarah discuss Anna Katharine Green, whose writing inspired Agatha Christie. Green’s 1878 novel, The Leavenworth Case, is one of the first to include a detailed coroner’s inquest and ballistic evidence and set the stage for generations of future mystery authors.

Discussed and mentioned

The Leavenworth Case (1878) Anna Katharine Green
A Strange Disappearance (1880) Anna Katharine Green
“The House in the Mist,” (1905) Anna Katharine Green
Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists. (2000). Martha Hailey DuBose, St. Martins Press.

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Transcript

This transcript is generated by a computer and there may be some mis-spellings and strange punctuation. We try to catch these before posting, but some things slip through.

Sarah	Welcome to the Clued in Mystery podcast. I’m Sarah.
Brook	And I’m Brook. And we both love mystery.
Sarah	So we’re going to talk about Anna Katharine Green this morning, Brook.
Brook	I’m so excited to talk about another one of the early mystery writers and somebody that I didn’t know a lot about until today.
Sarah	Yeah, I didn’t know very much about her either.
Brook	I will admit that I hadn’t read anything of hers before we decided that we were going to do an episode about her.
Sarah	As with all of the people that we’ve talked about, I think we’re probably just going to scratch the surface of what we can talk about in relation to her, but I’m looking forward to this.
Brook	Me too. Before we get started today, I just wanted to share another one of our listener comments. We love to hear from you guys. So thank you so much for sharing with us either on Instagram or on our email address. But today I’m going to share a comment from Jana Rollins. She’s another mystery author. And she says, I had to pop in and say how much I’m enjoying this podcast. I was a huge House fan, but never put the clues together to realize he was based on Sherlock. I was floored, but it makes so much sense. And I was thankful to hear from Jana Rollins because I too never put the clues together. So, I feel very validated. Thank you, Jana.
Brook	And just a reminder to anyone, if you are a subscriber, that’s wonderful. And think about maybe leaving a rating or a review because that really helps other people find the podcast. So this morning, I will tell you about the life of Anna Catherine Green.
Brook	Anna Katharine Green was born on November 11, 1846, in Brooklyn, New York. Her father was a lawyer and represented clients in both state and federal court cases. Her mother died during childbirth when Anna was just three, so her eldest sister, Sarah, became her mother-sister for several years. Eventually, her father remarried and her stepmother, Grace, was very supportive of the children’s education and Anna’s love of writing.
Brook	Anna was allowed to go to college in 1863 and she attended Ripley College. It was there that she made the acquaintance of Ralph Waldo Emerson and decided she would become a poet. She graduated college in 1866 and returned to live with her family back in Brooklyn. In 1898, Anna sent some of her poems to Emerson for his opinion. Unfortunately, he was not impressed and did not encourage her to continue her work in poetry, and so she turned her attention to crafting a novel.
Brook	Anna kept this project a secret from her family until it was finished. She was afraid that they would think it was silly or overly ambitious. But when she revealed her finished novel to them, she found that they were extremely supportive. Anna’s father was especially enthusiastic since her novel included extensive courtroom and legal knowledge that she had learned through his career as an attorney.
Brook	Her father was so proud, he arranged for her to meet George Putnam, who offered her a publishing contract for this novel entitled The Leavenworth Case. Together, Putnam and Green enjoyed a lucrative business relationship for years. The Leavenworth Case, published in 1878, is credited as the first detective novel written by an American woman, and it was a huge success. Wilkie Collins, who certainly influenced Green, wrote this about her. “Her powers of invention are so remarkable. She has such imagination and so much belief.”
Brook	Green’s story features Detective Ebenezer Grice of the New York Metropolitan Police Force and includes the now iconic features of a mystery novel such as a coroner’s inquest, expert testimony, ballistics, and…the first suspicious butler. In the later Grice books, he gets a sidekick, the elderly female snoop Amelia Butterworth. One million copies of The Leavenworth Case were sold, and it became required reading at Yale Law School, which certainly speaks to the accurate depiction of courtroom proceedings. And just to put this book, The Leavenworth Case, into context, it was published 15 years before Agatha Christie was even born, and And 10 years before the creation of Sherlock Holmes.
Brook	In 1884, after publishing four novels in the Detective Grice series, Green married Charles Rolfes, who was 10 years her junior. (Go Anna.) Ralphs was an actor and even toured in a stage production of The Leavenworth Case. When his acting career was finished, he became a successful furniture maker, and Green collaborated on several of his designs. They had three children together. Unfortunately, they outlived two of them after tragic accidents.
Brook	Although none of her subsequent books ever reached the massive success of The Leavenworth Case, Green was a prolific author and supported her family with crime fiction. She died on April 11, 1935, in Buffalo, New York at the age of 88. Her husband died the following year.
Brook	Outside of ardent mystery fans, Anna Katharine Green is rarely mentioned these days. We think of Sherlock Holmes instead of Detective Grice or Miss Marple instead of Amelia Butterworth. Still, readers of contemporary mystery fiction certainly have her to thank in part for the genre that we love.
Sarah	Thanks, Brook. What an interesting life. There’s so many things that I picked up on in that introduction to her. So, there mustn’t have been a lot of women who were going to college at the time. That must have been quite an opportunity for her.
Brook	You know, we learned that about Dorothy Sayers as well. Some of those first women who were allowed to go to college, literally allowed to go to college and also then to get the degree because that was some of times there were schools letting women go to school, but you were never going to be able to graduate.
Sarah	Yeah.
Brook	She was at a time and perhaps because we’re in America rather than Europe, I’m not sure how those rules were in place, but she did earn a degree. So that’s really cool.
Sarah	Yeah.
Brook	I’ve seen her referred to as kind of the grandmother of crime. And we talked about Poe. And so they’re kind of the grandparents of crime, I guess. Crime writing in the U.S., which is really interesting.
Sarah	I think it’s interesting that, as you say, she… I had never heard of her before we started kind of looking into the history of mystery. And, you know, I wonder what it is about her that has had her nearly, nearly forgotten. So I know in Agatha Christie’s bio, she refers to Anna Catherine Green as being an inspiration.
Brook	And I don’t remember if Dorothy Sayers said anything about her. But yeah, like there just doesn’t seem to be very I bet if you asked 10 people, they would have no idea. But if you ask 10 people about Poe or Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie, they would they would be able to say who those people were.
Brook	Yes, absolutely. I wondered, you know, here I’m referring to her location again, but I wondered if that was in part because she was American. And she also wrote about rather than being an American author and still trying to write about your opinion. European settings and people and places. She wrote about American locations and the way people talked in America and situations.
Brook	But there again, I don’t know if that’s an excuse because she was extremely popular in her time.
Sarah	Oh, for sure. To sell a million copies in the late 19th century would have been quite remarkable. And to be required reading at the law school, like that’s pretty incredible. I wonder if there’s any contemporary fiction authors who would be considered required reading it at law school now.
Brook	I know. And I thought, you know, that she must have had a very accurate way of portraying the stories and how those are some of the most difficult things in contemporary crime fiction. I just saw a conversation yesterday. it happens in the real world, quote unquote.
Brook	And so they were kind of talking back and forth like, is it okay to blur some of these things that happen in the real world in fiction? And it came back to, it is just a story and we’re going to accept some things with grains of salt and move forward with the storyline. But because of those things, you’re not going to read them in law school. So that just goes back again to how accurate and detailed her work was. You know, she wasn’t taking any of those liberties, the fictional liberties.
Sarah	Yeah. And you think about Doyle and how he wasn’t particularly interested in the detail. He wanted the historical accuracy, but, you know, was OK with continuity errors.
Brook	Right. Like that wasn’t a big deal to him.
Sarah	So I have read the first part of the Leavenworth case and I don’t know, maybe 100 pages in. maybe not quite 100 pages in, but the first part is this coroner’s inquest, and it is very detailed.
Brook	Is it?
Sarah	Mm-hmm. I will attest to that. Yeah, it’s very detailed. So much so that I can see why people, if they were given the option to read this book and something else, might choose something else because it does, I think, maybe drag on a little bit longer than it needs to. But in what I’ve read of hers, you can see where she’s planted the seeds for the genre, right? Yeah. There’s the narrator and he’s sort of adjacent to the detective. I think he’s a lawyer.
Sarah	You know, this house locked room mystery, the coroner’s inquest. There’s the very detailed information about bullets and ballistic evidence.
Brook	Yeah, you can see where all of those seeds have been planted and how other future authors would have read that and said, oh, okay, I can… I can do this. I can use this. That’s interesting.
Sarah	I am going to finish reading the book because I think it’s interesting enough that it’s capturing my attention. But there were a couple of points where I was like, okay, I think we could probably move on from that.
Brook	I get that because I knew that you were reading the first book, The Leavenworth Case. And so I decided that I would read book two, which is A Strange Disappearance. And I’m similar to you. I’m probably about a third of the way through. And I would say the same thing. The setup of this mystery is really good. And it’s a situation where the seamstress in this big manor house has disappeared. And another one of the housekeepers asks for Detective Grice’s help in finding her, and she’s sure that she’s been abducted.
Brook	Again, the setup is really good, but I’ll agree with you. There are parts and points that are just so procedural and long bits of information that are not what we’re used to in contemporary fiction. Our attention spans are so short now. So we want to get like more to the action. But I 100% agree with you as well that the seeds are there.
Brook	And if you think about… where she’s coming from, her predecessors. I definitely see some Poe because I also read The House in the Mist, which definitely has some Poe feelings to it. And then Wilkie Collins, which I’m hoping we’ll talk about in another episode. But she’s really formulating so much of this all on her own, the idea of the actual investigation and completion of a case that it’s really impressive.
Sarah	Well, and if you think about the time when her books were being published, I can see why they would have been popular because they were so new, right? And to provide that insight into what happens in a coroner’s inquest, right? Like, you know, I can remember when CSI came out, the television show, and that felt like wow, this is so amazing, right?
Sarah	And forensic science wasn’t new. I mean, I don’t know if there were other shows that came before CSI that went into that part of criminal investigation. It would be more the detectives or the police procedure or something like Murder, She Wrote, which wouldn’t have had anything to the degree of the kind of stuff that was in CSI.
Sarah	And so I wonder if there wasn’t a bit of that kind of like just feeling like people were having an opportunity to see something that they wouldn’t necessarily get to see.
Brook	Yeah. Kind of that voyeurism or the fly on the wall. You get to see this inside working.
Sarah	Yeah.
Brook	That’s a really good point. And we’re so used to it now that
Sarah	Mm hmm. Totally.
Brook	Yeah.
Sarah	I did not read anything that has the Amelia Butterworth, but that fascinates me. That she basically created who we think of as kind of the Miss Marple character in a book. Yeah, that’s really interesting because… So before that, Poe had Dupont, right? And… Well, the fact that it was a woman, right? Like that would have been quite remarkable.
Sarah	And…
Brook	An amateur.
Sarah	Yeah, thank you. That was the word I was looking for.
Brook	So an amateur woman as the sidekick.
Sarah	So you can definitely draw a line from her work to a lot of what we see today in the mystery space.
Brook	I read that part of the reason that Anna Catherine Green decided to add in Butterworth, because this was later in her series, is that she was having a difficult time because the police officers were very blue collar, Very common people, so to speak. And it was hard for her to create situations or reasons that they could get themselves into like kind of the upper class, more lush situations of these, you know upper class society people. And That’s what readers really wanted.
Brook	Speaking of the fly on the wall, they wanted to know what happened in these expensive homes and upper class families. So that was kind of a fun setting for the mystery. So she was trying to decide how she could do this. And so Miss Butterworth became this bridge as a way to… for him to have a lead in to some of these family situations. So I thought that was really interesting. And we still kind of do that or see that today but sometimes it’s in the reverse because we have this amateur sleuth and we’re thinking, how in the heck, why would she be at a crime scene?
Brook	You know, she’s a baker, whatever. So we give her, it almost happens opposite. We give her like the love interest of the police officer or something. And so it’s her excuse to be in the world of murder mystery.
Sarah	Yeah, interesting. A fascinating woman, I think. And you mentioned that her husband was 10 years younger than her. And he was successful in his own right, which I think is really great too, right? That they both had their own interests to pursue and were well recognized for those.
Brook	Right.
Sarah	So the other thing that I thought was really interesting was that she wrote in secret. And that is, I think, so common for writers, even still today, right? That, you know, you’ve got this inspiration, you feel like, Okay, I really want to get this story out, but I’m not going to tell anybody about it because I don’t want them to laugh at me. I don’t want them to think I’m, you know, being frivolous with my time or… whatever it is.
Sarah	And, you know, I don’t know if it was for her a little bit of imposter syndrome, or just because there weren’t a lot of women who were writing at the time. But I really, I think it’s interesting that that continues today, right? Like I wrote and didn’t tell anybody about what I was doing. I think maybe Brook, the same thing was for you, right? It was your secret project until it was ready.
Brook	Yeah. Yes. When I read that about her, I actually thought about the conversation you and I had about that. There are still people in our lives that we just really don’t bring it up to and we don’t talk about it. Not that we’re ashamed or embarrassed, but I think…You’re right. I think that there’s a part that feels sort of frivolous and or that they will think that it’s not important.
Brook	And that actually lends itself really good to something else I wanted to say about Her, which was different than some of the other authors we’ve discussed, which is I don’t feel like. Green ever had this feeling that she needed to be writing something more important.
Brook	She wrote mystery fiction and mysterious short stories for her entire career. She published gobs. You should look up her Wikipedia list of everything she published. She was very prolific. And unlike Sayers or Doyle, who we feel like they’re always trying to do something more intellectual or literary. She didn’t do that. Or if she was working on those things, they were not her impetus at all. She seemed to be very proud of doing this commercial, entertaining fiction. And I loved that about her. And I feel like I’d like to carry that torch for her.
Sarah	Yeah, I think that’s wonderful. Sometimes I struggle with the idea that writing in mystery is not serious writing, right? Like there’s this perception that it’s not literary, it’s not important. And so yeah, I like that that was the only thing that she did. And there’s nothing nothing wrong with people writing in multiple genres or wanting to do what’s considered more serious writing. But yeah, I like that too.
Brook	She stayed in that lane.
Sarah	Yeah.
Brook	Yeah. And when she got over, when she realized that the people in her life were very supportive, then she kind of took it and ran with it. And I will also say that I think that’s similar for you and I, that once we published those first books and realized, hey, people in our lives are really proud of us. It doesn’t have to be a secret anymore.
Sarah	I agree.
Brook	Yeah.
Sarah	What an interesting woman.
Brook	Very.
Sarah	So thanks, Brook. This was really interesting. And I’m really glad that we took the time to learn a little bit about Anna Katharine Green and the very important role that she’s played in mystery writing. Thank you for listening to the Clued In Mystery podcast. You can find us on Instagram at cluedinmystery or visit our website at cluedinmystery.com. We’d love to hear from you. You can always send us an email at hello at cluedinmystery. And feel free to leave us a rating or review wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Brook	Thanks for listening today on Clued in Mystery. I’m Brook.
Sarah	And I’m Sarah. And we both love mystery.