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[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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For a full episode transcript, visit https://cluedinmystery.com/re-release-anna-katharine-green/
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Transcript
Announcement & Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, it's Sarah. Brooke and I are taking a short break from recording new episodes to catch up on our reading lists and plan for the next season of Clued in Mystery. While we're off, we are re-releasing a few of our favorite episodes.
00:00:12
Speaker
We hope you enjoy.
00:00:24
Speaker
Welcome to the Clued in Mystery podcast. I'm Sarah. And I'm Brooke. And we both love mystery. So we're going to talk about Anna Catherine Green this morning, Brooke.
00:00:35
Speaker
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. Yeah, I didn't know very much about her either. I will admit that I hadn't read anything of hers before we decided that we were going to do an episode about her.
Listener Engagement & Feedback
00:00:51
Speaker
As with all of the people that we've talked about, I think we're probably just going to scratch the surface of of what we can talk about in relation to her. But I'm looking forward to this.
00:01:01
Speaker
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.
00:01:30
Speaker
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. 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.
Anna Catherine Green's Biography & Influence
00:01:53
Speaker
So this morning, i will tell you about the life of Anna Catherine Green. Anna Catherine Green was born on November 11, 1846 in Brooklyn, New York.
00:02:04
Speaker
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's sister for several years.
00:02:19
Speaker
Eventually, her father remarried, and her stepmother, Grace, was very supportive of the children's education and Anna's love of writing. Anna was allowed to go to college in 1863, and she attended Ripley College.
00:02:34
Speaker
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.
00:02:48
Speaker
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.
00:03:02
Speaker
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.
00:03:27
Speaker
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.
00:03:41
Speaker
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.'" 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.
00:04:39
Speaker
And just to put this book, The Leavenworth Case, into context, it was published 15 years before Agatha Christie was even born and 10 years before the creation of Sherlock Holmes.
00:04:52
Speaker
In 1884, after publishing four novels in the Detective Grice series, Green married Charles Rolfes, who was 10 years her junior. Go Anna.
00:05:02
Speaker
And Rolfes was an actor. Rolfes 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.
00:05:20
Speaker
They had three children together. Unfortunately, ah they outlived two of them after tragic accidents. 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.
00:05:36
Speaker
She died on April 11, 1935 in Buffalo, New York at the age of 88. Her husband died the following year. Outside of ardent mystery fans, Anna Catherine Green is rarely mentioned these days. We think of Sherlock Holmes instead of Detective Grice or Miss Marples instead of Amelia Butterworth.
Legacy & Comparison
00:05:57
Speaker
Still, readers of contemporary mystery fiction certainly have her to thank in part for the genre that we love. Thanks, Brooke. What an interesting life. There's so many things that I picked up on in that um introduction to her. So like 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 You know, we learned that about Dorothy Sayers as well. Some of those first women who were allowed to go to college, literally literally allowed to go to college and also then to get the degree because that was some of times they were um there were schools letting women go to school, but you were never going to be able to graduate. But, um you know, 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.
00:06:49
Speaker
Yeah. so 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 um in the US, s which is which is really interesting. i I think it's interesting that, as you say, she i had never heard of her before right we started kind of looking into the history of of mystery. And, you know, I wonder what it is about her that 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. And I Don't remember if Dorothy Sayers said anything about her.
00:07:30
Speaker
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. 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 european European settings and people and places. She wrote about American locations and the the way people talked in America and situations. But there again, i don't know if that's an excuse because she was extremely popular in her time. 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. Yeah. I wonder if there's any contemporary fiction authors who would be considered required reading it at law ah school now. I know. 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 on Instagram between two people who write mysteries, and they were talking about, do you, you know, where do you draw the line, the liberties you take? Because in this particular author's story, the cops don't interact with the state police in an accurate way, the way it happens in the real world, quote unquote. 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 you know 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. And 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. Yeah. And you think about Doyle and how he wasn't particularly interested in the detail. He wanted the historical accuracy, but, you know, it was OK with continuity errors, right? Like that that wasn't a big deal to him. So I have read the first part of the Leavenworth case, and i don't know, maybe 100 pages in, ah maybe not quite 100 pages in, but the first part is this coroner's inquest, and it is very detailed. Is it? 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 and something else, might choose something else because it does...
00:10:13
Speaker
It does, I think, maybe drag on a little bit longer than it then it needs to. But in the what I've read of hers, you can see where she's planted the seeds for the genre, right? Yeah.
00:10:26
Speaker
There's this the narrator, and he's sort of adjacent to the detective. he's ah I think he's a lawyer. you know, this house locked room mystery, the coroner's inquest. There's the very detailed information about um bullets and and ballistic evidence. Yeah, you can you can see where 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 i can use this. That's interesting. i'm going to i am going to finish reading the book because I think it's it's interesting enough that it's that it's capturing my attention. But there were a couple of points where i was like okay, I think you know we could probably move on from that.
00:11:07
Speaker
I get that because I knew that you were reading um the first book, The Leavenworth Case. And so I decided but 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 you know big manor house has disappeared. And another one of the housekeepers disappeared. asks for detective grice's help in finding her and she's sure that she's been abducted again it's the setup is really good but i'll agree with you there are parts and points that are just so procedural and in like long bits of information that are not what we're used to in contemporary fiction our attention spans are so short now So we we want to get like more to the action. But I 100% agree with you as well that the seeds are there. 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 she's really formulating so much of this all on her own, the idea of the actual um investigation and completion of a case that it's it's really impressive.
00:12:38
Speaker
Well, and and if you think about the time when when her books were being published, I can see why they would have been popular because there wasn't, they were so new, right? And to provide that insight into what happens in a coroner's inquest,
Influence on Mystery Writing
00:12:56
Speaker
right? Like, you know, I can remember to but remember when um when CSI came out, the television show, and that felt like wow, this is so amazing, right? And I mean, 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, you know, something like Murder, She Wrote, which wouldn't have had anything to the degree of the of the the kind of stuff that was in CSI. um And so, i you know, I wonder if there wasn't a bit of that kind of like just feeling like people were were having an opportunity to see something that they wouldn't necessarily get to see.
00:13:40
Speaker
Yeah, kind of that voyeurism or the fly on the wall. You get to see this inside working. Yeah, that's a really good point. And we're so used to it now that we forget that it didn't happen before. You didn't get to hear like the private conversations of the attorneys in the back room or you know the inner thoughts of the police force that we're used to seeing that portrayed, but they weren't. It had to be so exciting. Totally. 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, 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.
00:14:35
Speaker
And an amateur. yeah.
00:14:39
Speaker
An amateur. Yeah, thank you. that was what i was That was the word I was looking for. ah so an amateur woman as the sidekick. So you can definitely draw a line from her work to a lot of what we see today in the mystery space.
00:14:53
Speaker
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. 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 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? 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 mysteries.
Writing Process & Personal Reflections
00:16:10
Speaker
Yeah. Interesting. A fascinating woman, I think. And, you know, 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. Right.
00:16:27
Speaker
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? 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. And, you know, I don't know if it was for her a little bit of imposter syndrome,
00:16:54
Speaker
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 that continues today, right? Like I wrote and didn't tell anybody about about what I was doing. I think maybe Brooke, the same thing was for you, right? yes is it was your secret project until it was ready. Yeah. Yes. When I read that about her, I actually thought about the conversation you and I had about that.
00:17:20
Speaker
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. 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. She wrote mystery fiction and um mysterious short stories that
00:17:56
Speaker
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 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 it, you know, I feel like I'd like to carry that torch for her.
00:18:29
Speaker
Yeah, i 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. yes And so, yeah, I i like that that that was the only thing that that she did. And there's there's nothing wrong with people writing in multiple genres or or no you know wanting to do more so what's considered more serious writing. But yeah, I like that too. She stayed in that lane. Yeah. Yeah. And once 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 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. You know, it doesn't have to be a secret anymore.
00:19:13
Speaker
I agree. Yeah. what What an interesting woman. Very.
Conclusion & Acknowledgment
00:19:16
Speaker
So thanks, Brooke. this is This was really interesting. And i'm I'm really glad that we took the time to learn a little bit about Anna Catherine 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 Clued In Mystery 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. Thanks for listening today on Clued In Mystery.
00:19:45
Speaker
I'm Brooke. And I'm Sarah. And we both love mystery. Clued in Mystery is written and produced by Brooke Peterson and Sarah M. Stephen. Music is by Shane Ivers.
00:19:56
Speaker
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00:20:10
Speaker
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