WHY should the foremost living American writer of detective stories be a woman? The female mind does not as a rule reach distinction in exactly that direction. Not since the death of Edgar Allen Poe has any American gained, in this popular branch of fiction, as much fame as the author of “The Leavenworth Case.”
I am a fanatic about Mrs. Rohlfs’ novels, not from the standpoint of literary qualities but from that of plot. Indeed I do not read much contemporary literature for my literary food. For style and for deep thought about life I like to go to the greatest writers selected out of many centuries. Detective stories to me are part of life’s diversion, and the plot and its handling are everything. On that subject I am what is elegantly called a nut.
I was sitting in the Buffalo home of this writer, who had given me so many exciting hours, eating an attractive Sunday midday dinner. Also I was looking into the garden where much of her happiness is, and where much of her writing has been done; for the thrilling novels of this lady have been written in pencil on pads, and the pad has rested in her lap while she sat with her flowers before her.
Men much better known than I have made the pilgrimage to Buffalo to see Anna Katharine Green, whom we might as well begin to call Mrs. Rohlfs, as she is very happily married to Charles Rohlfs, once an actor, now a designer. The English scholar, A. V. Dicey, went to Buffalo exclusively to see her. He also became the channel through which she became the friend of the still more famous Lord Bryce. Wilkie Collins, William M. Evarts and James G. Blaine are among those who have been enthusiastic over this lady’s books, and Theodore Roosevelt wrote her a letter about a month before he died. The earliest personage to comment on her writing was the most famous of them all, Ralph Waldo Emerson. So perhaps it is no wonder that as you approach Buffalo you may see the sign reproduced on this page. During our dinner I no doubt looked at Mrs. Rohlfs more than was strictly needed for purposes of conversation. Her face and temper had a powerful attraction for me. Her seventy-eight years, far from taking away her qualities, show us what age can be when it is alert, sincere and sweet. Mr. Rohlfs sat at one end of the table and carved the roast beef. Mrs. Rohlfs was at the other end. To the guest came naturally the seat looking into the garden. The only other member of the family at home is a large and beautiful cat, which is white occasionally, just after she has been washed. As their three children are married, the harmonious couple live alone.
“I was a grandmother,” says Mrs. Rohlfs, “before I wrote my first love story.”
The daughter lives in Buffalo. The older son is on a ranch in the West. The younger son, the noted aviator, Roland Rohlfs, lives on Long Island, and has made several world records. An interesting bit of heredity or family atmosphere is that this aviator has recently put one of his ideas about aviation into the form of fiction. He established in 1919 a world’s altitude record of 32,450 feet. The next day he made another world’s record by climbing twenty thousand feet in ten minutes. At that time he held the world’s seaplane record, which he had made in 1919. In 1918 he also made a world’s record for speed at Dayton, Ohio. His dream just now is to get to the top of Mt. Everest, the highest spot in the world, by airplane, and that dream is the subject of his first venture into the short story field.
But you want to hear what, as we pack away the excellent food, Mrs. Rohlfs is saying. The talk really began before we sat down. As I entered the large living-room my eye fell on a book, pleasantly bound, evidently one of a set, that lay open, face down; and I picked it up.
“There is a good plot,” said I, for I had always thought the plot of “Our Mutual Friend” one of the best in all Dickens.
“The story is well handled,” said Mrs. Rohlfs. “If you have the patience to get into it, it holds you.”
“The novelists of today,” she was saying in a moment, “have much intelligence. But there is one quality I do not find in them that is in the earlier masters. I do not find the quality of delight.”
As we took our seat at the table I plunged into the subject of English poetry. Not many of the readers of Anna Katharine Green know that she wrote verse before fiction, and that her first and still most popular novel was written to make money to enable her to go on with her career as a poet. So I threw out my own list of the English poets that most fully keep their life for me.
“Of course,” said Mrs. Rohlfs, “Shakespeare comes first with me also, but I am sorry you put Shelley third. He ought to be second. Milton I admire but do not love.”
It was a long time ago, in 1868, that Ralph Waldo Emerson told Miss Green, then twenty-two years old, to return frequently to Milton and Shakespeare. “I was at Ripley College, Vermont,” Mrs. Rohlfs related, “a girl’s college that no longer exists. Mr. Emerson had come to lecture. Afterwards we initiated him into a society we had, and as I was the most active member it fell largely to me to carry out the ceremony. Mr. Emerson talked the same deep and rich wisdom that he puts into his most careful essays. My dream then was to be a poet. I wrote to him for advice.”
Emerson wrote four pages back to the school-girl, and his letter, framed, is one of Mrs. Rohlfs’ dearest possessions. “Write whenever you can,” he said, “and be thankful; read Milton and Shakespeare a good deal from time to time to see if your own lines are growing more cheerful and wise; and with whatever success you obtain you will be sure of that one, that all your writing educates to a better insight and enjoyment of the good minds and of nature.”
I am sure Emerson was right. Mrs. Rohlfs’ hard work, her constant reading and thought, have helped to make the life happiness that is written on her face.
Soon after Emerson’s visit, and while the young Anna Katharine Green was still in college, Scribner’s Magazine accepted one of her poems. That first success, called “Shadows,” has since been set to music.
“But my first work,” she said, “was done before I went to college, even in my early teens, when I used to write fiction at school. After college I was interested only in poetry. It was my mother who said, ‘Why don’t you write a novel?’ ‘If I do,’ I thought to myself, ‘it will be a story of plot.’” “The Leavenworth Case” took her two years.
Its reception was such that her career was assured.
And as she thought of her early days, she smiled and said: “I wasn’t much of a scholar at first. It was only when I reached geometry that I showed any special aptitude. Perhaps there is something in common between the constructive problems of that study and the construction of plots.”
I asked her if the stories of real crime, in the newspapers, gave her any of her plots, and she answered: “No. Or if any suggestions do come that way they are so changed by the time the book is conceived that they cannot be recognized. My method of writing a novel is to think of two incidents, or situations—always two. I cannot do it with one. When I have these two points I proceed to block out the whole novel before I write the first chapter. I have never departed from that method in any of my novels except one, and that is the only one for which the idea was given to me by some one else.
“The novel is ‘The Step on the Stair’—my favorite—and the idea came from Mr. George Doran, at a tea given by Miss Carolyn Wells. Mr. Doran and I were talking books. He said, “You have read stories, no doubt, in which the complications of plot arose from the exact likeness between two people?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘I have been guilty of that myself.’ I alluded to my novel ‘Behind Closed Doors’ ‘But,’ continued Mr. Doran, ‘do you remember any in which these same complications arose from two persons having precisely the same name?’ I did not and said so, whereupon he made me a present of the idea.
“It was a good idea, but a year passed without my seeing any story. Then, being anxious to write, I decided to do what I had never done before, begin writing with such matter as I had on hand, and hope for further inspiration as I proceeded. I did this, and the second idea soon came.
“A man who wishes to leave the bulk of his fortune to one of two nephews, but has not as yet decided which, has two wills secretly drawn up, one in favor of one nephew and one in favor of the other. These two wills are to be held in his possession till he makes his decision, when the undesirable one is to be destroyed. This idea added to the other gave me my story.
“I think the reason this story is my favorite is that as I have grown older I have felt a craving for putting more sentiment into my novels.”
In my quality of detective story nut I was tremendously excited about this inside view of how the novels are made that have kept me enthralled. I therefore induced the good-humored creator of the plots to tell me what were the central points from which other novels had sprung. Here is what she answered:
“In ‘The Leavenworth Case’ the first idea was to have the perpetrator of the crime be the one first to tell of it. The second idea was that a detective, passing a closed door and overhearing one woman accusing another of the crime, attributed the voice to the wrong woman. If you compare such bald and seemingly unrelated things with the elaboration, you will see how much the simplest idea stands for in the storyteller’s mind. In my case the first conception is an anchorage to steady me on a course from which there must be no deviation.
“In ‘Hand and Ring’ the basic ideas on which the plot was based were as usual two: First, a man had every reason to suspect his sweetheart of a crime and she had just as good reason for suspecting him. Second, a case which I had read about in which a farmer’s wife killed her husband under the persuasion, as everybody believed but no one could prove, of one of the farmhands. The husband after the attack lay unconscious for six hours, then died. The woman was punished, but nothing could he done legally against the farm-hand. Some months after, he was driving through a wood when a limb fell on him. He lived six hours, then died.
“In using these facts I put the people in a higher social class. Number two was in my mind a year or two before I saw my story. When number one came the whole plot resolved itself into concrete form in a night.”
For a long time after “The Leavenworth Case” was published Mrs. Rohlfs in this country was alone in the field. I do not count it a real detective story when there is merely a hurly-burly of adventures in which a detective happens to wander about. By a detective story of the kind that attracts intellectual men I mean a mystery solved by brilliant reasoning from facts, the most important of which are in the possession of the reader early in the story. The best of the Sherlock Holmes stories are the standard.
“Poe was the first person to write stories of deductive reasoning by a detective, was he not?” I said.
“Yes, but Poe was not absolutely the first to suggest that style of reasoning. There is a very slight example in ‘Zadig,’ by Voltaire.”
Which is perfectly true. You never can tell what genius will be up to.
“I was greatly interested,” Mrs. Rohlfs went on, “many years ago, by the novels of Gaboriau. He did some splendid work in elaborating the ideas he got from Poe.”
We had that in common also, for Gaboriau has given me many happy hours. His detective, Lecoq, is the son of Poe’s Dupin, and the father of Sherlock Holmes. He is a worthy relative of them both.
” ‘The Hand and the Ring,’” Mrs. Rohlfs said, “was my most difficult work. I think some of my best stories are ‘The Golden Slipper,’ ‘The House of Clocks,’ ‘The Millionaire Baby,’ and ‘The Lady in Black.’
“Different elements in a story appeal to different readers. Girls took a powerful interest in the character of Doctor Molesworth in ‘Behind Closed Doors.’ Many of them wrote me while this novel was running serially, begging me not to kill him. It is amusing that he was a man very cool toward women.” Here Mrs. Rohlfs smiled, as if at a frailty in her sex.
“In that novel,” she went on, “I introduced the great blizzard of 1886. The publishers of the German edition wanted this blizzard taken out, on the ground that their readers would not believe such a blizzard ever happened.
“And speaking of probability, there is one experience I can never forget, and naturally I have often spoken of it. Mr. Rohlfs and I happened to be stuck in a cab in a jam in London. My husband stepped out to see what was holding up the traffic. It grew out of an accident to a push-cart, and the push-cart was piled full of—what? Of copies of ‘The Leavenworth Case.’ Think of the coincidences necessary for that incident to occur. The author had to cross the ocean, take a cab at a certain moment, for a certain place, and at just the right instant reach the spot where the push-cart, full of copies of my first novel, managed to block the traffic. Many incidents in real life would have to be made more probable if they were to be used in fiction.”
Believe me, fellow detective story fans, I found it hard to end my visit. But finally I did get away, leaving unmentioned a hundred topics I should have enjoyed talking over with the charming lady, with her quiet house, the garden behind, the desk with its row of thirty books that I dare say I shall be reading again when I have lived through twenty more years. The hold on me of those books from now on will be even greater, because I have come to know the sincerity and sweet enthusiasm of the lady on whose yellow pad they came into the world.