The Leavenworth case

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The Leavenworth case is a Victorian crime thriller by Anne Katharine Green set in Washington, DC in the second half of the 19th century. It was published by Putnam Verlag in 1878 and was soon published in several European countries. The novel was Green's first work and established her literary fame. Not least because of this work, she is considered to be the founder of modern detective history. The novel received positive reviews from both Wilkie Collins and Émile Gaboriau , was considered one of the favorite novels of British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and was for a time required reading for students at Yale Law School .

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The venerable Mr. Leavenworth, a wealthy merchant, sits shot dead in a locked library. - Murder in the closed room! Suicide is out of the question. The coroner calls the residents of the house together at the scene and questions them meticulously. Instead of clarifying the mysterious death, however, everything just becomes more confused. Which of the nieces will benefit from the sudden death of the rich uncle? A young lawyer becomes detective Gryce's helper, but facts and conclusions lead in surprising directions. Can one of the cousins ​​ever live without reproach if the other is convicted of the crime?

History of origin

Anna Katharine Green, born in 1846, was the daughter of a New York lawyer and received an upbringing that was unusually good for her time. She studied at Ripley College, Vermont and graduated with a bachelor's degree. She had met Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others, during her studies and originally aimed to publish poetry herself. However, her poetic attempts found no positive response from Emerson, so that she tried from around 1868 to establish herself as a novelist. Contrary to what she expected, her first work - The Leavenworth Case - did not meet with rejection from her father. He put her in contact with the publisher George Putnam, who published the novel in 1878.

classification

The detective novel is both a psychological study and a psychogram of the characters involved and the time in which it is set. At the beginning of the book there are sketches of the crime scene, through which the reader can clarify the extent of the crime (murder in a closed room, a popular topic of Victorian detective writers).

The novel is considered formative for the development of the detective novel for several reasons:

  • detailed and realistic description of the procedure of a coroner
  • Evidence using ballistics
  • Solution of the case, among other things, through a reconstructed letter
  • the first suspicious butler in crime fiction
  • sketchy representation of the crime scene

The literary historian Alma E. Murch noted that it was in Green's work for the first time that the characteristics that made the English-language detective novel of the following 50 years appear.

Inspector Gryce is also the first police detective to become a protagonist in a series. Around 20 years after The Leavenworth Case appeared , Greens introduced yet another detective fiction device by adding the wealthy, well-mannered Miss Amelia Butterworth to it. With the introduction of two main characters - in this case Inspector Gryce and the amateur detective Butterworth - Green found an acceptable solution to one of the fundamental problems of early crime novels: police officers were typically lower social classes and in the 19th century it was neither in the United States States still in Great Britain realistically imaginable that a member of this class was on the same level with members of one of the upper social classes. At the same time, the reading public was primarily interested in crime stories that took place in the upper milieu. With the introduction of the wealthy and well-mannered Butterworth, Green solved this problem. She found, among other things, an imitator by Dorothy Sayers , who puts the amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey at the side of her character, Inspector Parker from Scotland Yard.

expenditure

  • The Leavenworth case. A lawyer's story (The knickerbocker series of choice American novels; Vol. 1). Putnam, New York 1892.
  • The Leavenworth case . Penguin Books, New York 2010, ISBN 978-0-14-310612-8 (reprint of New York 1892 edition; with a foreword by Michael Sims).
    • German translation: The Leavenworth case . Rio-Verlag, Zurich 1993, ISBN 3-9520059-6-7 .
    • German translation: Deadly love. The Leavenworth case . Independently published (November 29, 2018), ISBN 978-1790436910
    • Adaptation: Wilbur Braun: The Leavenworth case. A mystery play in a prologue and three acts . S. French Publ., Los Angeles 1935.

literature

  • Martha Hailey Dubose: Women of Mystery - The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists . Thomas Dunne Books, New York 2011, ISBN 9780312276553 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Martha Hailey Dubose: Women of Mystery , p. 7.
  2. ↑ Martha Hailey Dubose: Women of Mystery , p. 7.
  3. ↑ Quoted from Martha Hailey Dubose: Women of Mystery , p. 7. The original quote is: ... in her work we can discern for the first time, in its entirety, the pattern that became characteristic of most English detective novels written during the following fifty years.
  4. ↑ Martha Hailey Dubose: Women of Mystery , p. 9.