Green, Anna Katherine - A Strange Disappearance (1880)

A STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE (1880)

By Anna Katharine Green (1846-1935)

A wealthy NYC bachelor is so obtuse in matters related to his household (and his heart) that he fails to realize his true love had been living (in disguise, of course) right under his nose for some time. The young woman’s subsequent disappearance may somehow be related to the criminal activities of her relatives. Her rescue will depend upon the deductions of police detective Gryce and the legwork of his assistant, “Q”. One must read the entire book to learn why the bachelor and the young woman behave so oddly at times and often act at cross-purposes to each other.

I cannot recommend this Victorian-era crime melodrama (the author’s second published mystery, following THE LEAVENWORTH CASE by two years) to casual mystery readers but serious students of the genre will readily discern Green’s rightful place in the development of the detective story after reading this chestnut. The Great Detective making startling deductions from crime scene clues and his erstwhile assistant/narrator performing the necessary legwork to tie up loose ends must have seemed new and exciting to nineteenth-century readers when this book was first published.

What certainly was not new was Green’s writing style, which featured stilted dialogue, tedious speeches, overlong flashbacks and melodramatic storylines. This apparently was the type of writing expected and preferred by readers of that era. The problem Green eventually faced was that her writing style barely changed over the decades, even after the reading public came to prefer a more modern (wry, humorous, ironic) style as exhibited by Mary Roberts Rinehart.

A better introduction to Anna Katherine Green for today’s mystery readers would be THE GOLDEN SLIPPER AND OTHER PROBLEMS FOR VIOLET STRANGE (1915). Howard Haycraft was wrong for casually dismissing these stories in his landmark work MURDER FOR PLEASURE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE DETECTIVE STORY (1941). Several of the Violet Strange stories feature complex plots, real detection and satisfying solutions to puzzling mysteries. These adventures of a young NYC heiress who secretly works as a PI in order to earn extra income (away from her father’s inquisitive eyes) are well worth seeking out.

Bob Schneider 08/08