I HAD NOT thought to meet a frail and diffident lady, who for the most part would talk to me about the felicities of her home, her husband and her children, when in the city of Buffalo I sought out the author who had given to President Wilson what he called his “most authentic thrills”, and was described by Mr. Baldwin, when he was the Prime Minister of England, as the creator of “what I still believe to be the best detective stories ever written”.
Mr. Edgar Wallace, lately termed in America “Thrill-maker to the King”, I had already met; and there was to me a seemliness in his air of worldly wisdom and spacious opulence. All the ends of the underworld might be revealed to his seeing eye without fluttering his Olympian calm. It was not so with Anna Katharine Green, an established “thriller” of the first rank when Edgar Wallace ran errands up and down the Old Kent Road, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was still a medical student in Edinburgh University. She was unlike my most temperate visions of one who had spent her life in a labyrinthine world of hot-footed detectives on the scent of iniquitous crime.
She was gentle, courteous, gracious—even shy. She sat in a high-backed chair surrounded with books and dark oak furniture, distilling mellowness and wisdom. I might have been in the atmosphere of Concord, with Emerson, whose courtly letters to the young mystery writer I had just been reading. I might have been in the company of any one of Barrie’s lavender-perfumed ladies of undeniable refinement.
But unlike Barrie’s ladies she did not suggest Age; and in spite of tiresomely accurate biographies I still find it difficult to believe that Anna Katharine Green is eighty-three years old. Particularly in her eyes is that expression of eager curiosity which seems more effective than any “treatment” in holding Youth captive. Her interest in life is unquenchable.
Equally alive and active is her memory of the incidents and chapters of her many books—of difficulties surmounted and expediencies resorted to in her efforts to purvey mysteries and puzzles to men who have delighted in such things since before the days when Solomon propounded his puzzles and the Sphinx her mystery.
More than fifty years have passed since Anna Katharine Green published her first mystery story, The Leavenworth Case, written during an interval of tedious inactivity after she had graduated from the Ripley Female College at Poultney, Vermont. Her inspiration she traces to Gaboriau who, thirty years after Poe’s Dupin, created M. Lecoq, the original begetter of Sherlock Holmes and of every other transcendently infallible detective of the sardonic mood.
She had wanted to be a poet; she had written verse since she was a child; but it was far from the Well of Helicon that she discovered her true vocation. And even now she finds it simpler to trace the source of her inspiration than to understand why a girl brought up in an atmosphere of irreproachable gentility and graduated from the Ripley Female College should at last find herself at home in the dense tangles of crime and passion.
Her literary self she discovered in the conception and execution of The Leavenworth Case, born and bred “entirely in my imagination”. She ceased to chafe and fret at the triviality of life as it appeared to the graduate fresh from Vermont. Her days, nights, months, years were absorbed in a fever of activity. She filled sheets of odd paper with millions of words—always concealing the masterpiece from her father, who seems to have set his heart upon her being a poet.
As with Fanny Burney—whose first book was composed in circumstances very like those in which the graduate from the Ripley Female College labored—the story secretly written through troubled years was destined for a fate similar to Evelina, which moved Johnson to ecstatic praise and which Burke sat up all night to read. Anna Katharine Green at once became famous; and her verse, which had languished in obscurity, now saw the light as the work of “the author of The Leavenworth Case“.
With what high seriousness the mystery story was approached fifty years ago! In tones of justifiable regret its author talked to me of the decline of the detective story from an art to a process of mass-production; of the degeneration of Mystery to mere surprise:
“We wrote for love of our work,” she said. “They, it seems, write only for dollars.”
I did not wonder at the sadness in her voice when she described for me the infinite labor, the planning, modelling, the sheer thought and attention to detail that went to the building of a mystery story in those halcyon days. The writer had a conscience which spurred him on through agonizing years to further and yet further effort. It was his high responsibility never to mislead his reader with false devices and puppets designed to involve him in irrelevancies; never to make use of exotic colorings to veil the poverty of his invention; yet on the other hand never to admit a suggestion of the solution by so much as a badly rendered paragraph. His task was dominated and directed by his sense of duty toward his reader.
Alas! how unlike the modern practitioner of the detective story and the cavalier manner in which he treats us: he who leaves his corpse so vaguely accounted for, his ciphers in their pristine hieroglyphic, trusting to luck for the progress and climax of his story—”who thinks that he has done enough if he finds a surprise for the end of his book; for he will not wait for an idea”, she said, in gentle reproof. Even the love-interest is “simply lugged in”; it is no indispensable part of the organic whole.
More bitter than gall and wormwood it is to the soul of the spinner of bygone mysteries to survey the hapless writer of today using the machinery of the detective story invented by Poe and Gaboriau.
“I had to wait for an idea before ever I could write my stories—for a vivid, overpowering conception. For years an incident would germinate in my mind. Then suddenly, perhaps in the night, I would wake with my story conceived from the first page to the last.”
No hasty flinging together of the story was permitted to Anna Katharine Green. Often it took her years to translate her conception—to build detail on detail, to evolve incident from incident, to invent legitimate expediences in tight places—keeping the love-interest always “in its proper place”. She never wilfully, playfully or carelessly misled her readers; she only outwitted them with her nicer ingenuity, “so that in the end they had to admit that had they but the eyes to see, the penetration to discover, there, from the start, was the solution of the mystery”. In this manner The Leavenworth Case was written, chapter succeeding chapter in cumulative dramatic effect until the inevitable end. “Often I would write a chapter ten times over.”
Sitting there listening to the history of these past agonies of endeavor I blushed for my prolific compatriot, Edgar Wallace, and for the easy tolerance with which I have looked on while his hero lit a cigarette on one page only to be found on the next page puffing at a pipe. I fear that conscience does not direct his writings. Phrases descriptive of his happy facility have entered the English idiom: “Have you seen today’s Edgar Wallace?” Or again: “The latest addition to the Wallace Collection!”
It is said that between a couple of race meetings he casts down the dictaphone a fifty-thousand word “shocker”. Moreover, he appears to thrive on this casual fecundity, this trifling with the machinery of mystery so laboriously constructed and used by classic writers. He looks more hale and hearty after each book; while the author of The Leavenworth Case so depleted her nervous energy in the creation of that book that she has “never since felt so well”.
It is in no querulous, carping, over-critical spirit that Anna Katharine Green discusses contemporary work in mystery and detection. She approaches it as one who cares tremendously for the fate of the medium she has studied and practised so long. She is ever looking for work that is virile in conception and not shoddy in execution, that makes use of legitimate thrills, and shows symptoms of assuming intelligence on the reader’s part.
When I think of the disciple of Poe and Gaboriau sitting in her high-backed chair in the company of Dickens and Shakespeare and many various editions of her own work, reflecting pensively on this alien age, I wonder if, forty years from now, any mystery-spinner of today will have the intense interest she has in the fruits of his imagination. I wonder if in his old age he will, like Anna Katharine Green, pore critically over his published work in search of redundancies and superfluities.
I think not! We seem to have lost the attitude of high seriousness toward the mystery story which characterizes the work of Anna Katharine Green and her contemporaries. We are more than tolerant of the efforts of our more than careless generation of mystery writers: we smile at their tenuity, at the inexhaustible strength and faith of their heroines and the infallible, if blundering, perception of their detectives. They have for many of us only one indisputable merit: they move rapidly. And though the swiftness of their action may be the speed of a Jazz age it leaves the author little space for description and strivings after effects; and for this we are glad.
The tributes of statesmen and men of affairs, however, and the revival in her own country and in England of The Leavenworth Case are proof that the conscience and quality which distinguish the work of fifty years ago are not entirely unappreciated by this hurried capricious generation.