A 1001 Midnights Review: ANNA KATHARINE GREEN – The Leavenworth Case.

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review by Marcia Muller ANNA KATHARINE GREEN – The Leavenworth Case. Dover, softcover, 1981. (Reprint of the 1878 hardcover edition.) This is a cornerstone novel of the mystery genre — the nineteenth-century American best seller that brought the detective novel into the public eye and raised it to hitherto unknown .. “respectable” status. First published in 1878, it is the best known of Green’s more than thirty novels and is thought by many critics to set the pattern for subsequent detective stories. As Alma E. Murch points out in The Development of the Detective Novel (1958), “… Green not only made her detective the leading figure and formulated a plan of construction that later became conventional. She also introduced characters and incidents that were new in her day, though they have since become familiar in novels of this type….” Indeed the contemporary reader will find nothing new or surprising about The Leavenworth Case. Mr. Leavenworth, a “retired merchant of…