The Leavenworth Case is one of the very early murder mysteries, written well before the commonly accepted period of Golden Age of crime fiction. But I’m including it in this grouping because of the link it has with the Golden Age. It features many of the common tropes from later detective fiction, but because it was one of the first to use them, they can’t be considered clichés. Many later books may feature millionaires found dead in their (locked without a key) library, beautiful heiresses, threats to change a will, a small closed circle of suspects, a map of the murder scene, a coroner’s enquiry brimming over with medical and ballistic evidence to set out all the known facts, and the pairing of an amateur detective with a professional from the police. But this book helped make all of these common tropes popular.

The Leavenworth Case was published 10 years before Arthur Conan Doyle published his first Sherlock Holmes story. The police detective in this book, Ebenezer Gryce, went on to feature in twelve more of Green’s mysteries, becoming the first example of a series detective character. In later books Green also pioneered the use of a female detective, with both a nosy spinster, Amelia Butterworth, and a girl detective, Violet Strange, a debutante who is secretly a sleuth. The Amelia Butterworth Series would comprise of three novels which overlap with the Gryce series, wherein the two detectives team up. You can view a list of the titles in the Mr Gryce series and their overlap with the Amelia Butterworth series by clicking here.

Agatha Christie even claimed that this book was one of her inspirations to start writing her own mysteries. Amelia Butterworth is thought to be an inspiration for Miss Marple. Christie even alludes to the influence of Green in one of her books. So The Leavenworth Case holds a fairly significant position in the history of crime fiction.

In the opening pages we meet the narrator, Mr Raymond, a lawyer. He is called to the house of a client of his senior partner, a Mr Horatio Leavenworth, by Mr Leavenworth’s private secretary (James Trueman Harwell) with the news that Mr Leavenworth has been murdered and that Mary and Eleanore Leavenworth, Mr Leavenworth’s nieces, urgently need support at the coroner’s enquiry. Mr Raymond steps up to support clients of his firm, but his professionalism is quickly displaced when he meets Eleanore Leavenworth.

The house had been securely locked for the night, and it is obvious that the murderer can only be an inmate of the house. The servants are quickly discounted, leaving only Mary and Eleanore as suspects. And circumstantial evidence quickly leads all to suspect Eleanore’s guilt. Mr Raymond is of course convinced of her innocence, so he joins forces with Gryce, determined to find out who really killed Leavenworth.

This is not a quick read. The writing is very long winded, loaded with florid, descriptive passages. There are frequent dramatic and/or emotional outpourings by the two heroines, designed to show how completely innocent they are. It all gets a bit wearying at times, even melodramatic. Despite this, I enjoyed the story, and once I got used to the style, wanted to keep reading it to find out what had really happened. Fittingly, for the style of this book, I read it in a very old-fashioned manner, by reading it in small daily doses, very carefully metered out, over 35 issues of a serial. Green knows how to keep her readers interested, with new information being fed to us at intervals, casting suspicion on first one sister, then the other, then back to the first. Neither Mary nor Eleanore tells the detectives all they know, and their constant concealing of the truth delays solving what turns out to be a fairly simple mystery. There are plenty of clues provided across the story, some of them useful and some red herrings. Gryce seems to share everything he learns with Raymond, but we later find out he was skilfully manipulating Raymond to get the information he needed.

This isn’t one of the best mysteries I’ve ever read, but it did entertain me and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in the historical development of detective fiction.