The Dead Letter and The Figure Eight
The first American author, male or female, to write a full-length novel of detection was a Victorian-era woman, Metta Fuller Victor. Another nineteenth-century woman author, Anna Katherine Green, invented the amateur spinster sleuth, whose progeny are legion, ranging from Agatha Christie's Miss Marple to a gaggle of contemporary cozy heroines on both sides of the Atlantic. Green achieved any number of detective fiction firsts, including the first use of an icicle as murder weapon.Duke University Press has reissued four long out-of-print novels by these trailblazers. These books won't break out on any best-seller lists, but they are valuable for illuminating the development of the crime novel, the constrictions of the Victorian age that planted the seeds of feminism, and for showing the centrality of women in popular fiction. They are also pretty fun to read, sort of like cruising through hoary melodramas or dime novels. Green's spinster sleuth, Amelia Butterworth, investigates the murder of a young woman in the house next door and the mystery of a haunted mansion. Butterworth is an old snoop but a crafty one. Readers will cringe at the condescension of Ebenezer Gryce, the first police detective to sneer at a woman detective. The reissued Victor novels have male narrators, much concern over contemporary politics (post-Civil War confusion figures prominently inThe Dead Letter), and page-turning action. Scholar Catherine Ross Nickerson provides introductions to both books, making a resounding case for the importance of these women in the development of the mystery.Connie FletcherCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.