Green seems
to revel in cliff-hanger chapter endings. Woven
into the tangled plot are a wealth of intriguing
elements, including a secret marriage,
a past betrayal, a missing key, a vanished
servant, a mysterious mustached man, a
forged confession, a fragment of sinister letter
to the victim, a name etched into a window
pane, assumed identities, and overheard
arguments. There are red herrings galore.
It is sometimes tempting to
fault The Leavenworth Case as a clichéd
work… until one realizes that this is the book
that established the situations and lines that
would later become clichés.

When Anna Katharine Green’s phenomenally successful
first novel, The Leavenworth Case, was published
in 1878, members of the Pennsylvania State
Legislature spent time in session debating whether a
woman could have actually penned such a work. The Yale Law School faculty,
however, had no doubts about the merit of the book—they made The Leavenworth
Case required course reading.