Anna Katharine Green, the author of ” The Leavenworth Case,” lives in South Brooklyn in a cosy little brick house something after the Queen Anne style, where as Mrs. Rohlfs, the name by which she is known outside her novels, she manages to vibrate between writing desk and nursery in the same cheery, comfortable fashion in which most literary women who are at the same time mothers of families do.
“How did you, being a woman, come to be so well up in detective cases?” she was asked the other day.
“I don’t believe I could tell you,” was the reply. “It may seem a strange confession to make, coming from a woman who has written more detective stories than anything else, but I was never inside a court room in my life. I never knew a detective, and I never had any personal experiences that would give me knowledge of matters of that sort.”
“How can you write intelligently then of the tricks of a trade that you have not learned ?”
“I do not know. It has seemed to me instinct always. When I first thought of writing it was the unraveling of the clues that would lead to the detection of a crime that seemed the subject that was made for me. I carried the germ of “The Leavenworth Case” in my mind from the time I was 14 years old. When the time came to write it I couldn’t help doing so.”
“You never make any study of the phases of actual criminal life, then, for the color of your tales?”
“Not especially, no. When I have wished to describe the robbery of a bank, I have gone to look the entrances and exits over not to make mistakes that would be absurd to business men. In writing up a long trial, as in one of my books, I have studied the statutes not to be out of the way in my law, But as for studying criminals from the life I have never done that at all. It was one of the promises my husband made me before we were married that he would take me through the quarters to see something of low life in New York, but somehow we have never found time after all. Human nature is much the same in everybody; a criminal is a man or woman, and as for the details of detective business I put my wits at work and let my scouts do exactly as under the same circumstances I would do myself.”
“Then doesn’t it happen that your men do things differently from the officers in real life?”
“It may be so, of course; but, after all, the newspaper incidents, supposed to stand for actual facts, that have utilized sometimes, are the things that the critics have pounced upon as being unreal. I don’t know that when I have trusted to human nature and common sense I have ever been accused of want of life likeness at all. Any writer will tell you that it is always the truth and not the products of your imagination that people won’t believe.”
” Do you write rapidly?”
“Sometimes and sometimes not. It is the development of the plot that interests me. A love tale or a society drama or a character sketch without a strong thread of story I couldn’t write at all.”
Mrs. Rohlfs is fortunate above most literary women in having a husband who plays the part of Cerberus, the watch dog, shielding her from interruption as their wives are supposed to guard literary men. She is young and like most writers who have made a success in one specialty sets more value on appreciation in another line. Her detective stories, the first of which, “The Leavenworth Case,” gave her a standing and has been followed by a number of others since, are not to her of anything like the consequence of a volume of her poems collected this spring.