SOURCE: "America: 1890-1914 (The Romantic Age)," in Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective Story, D. Appleton-Century Company, Incorporated, 1941, pp. 83-102.

In the following excerpt, Haycraft underscores the historical importance of Green's mysteries, particularly The Leavenworth Case, to the detective genre in America.

Unless the reader is prepared to admit Nick Carter and his confreres and the semi-fictional Pinkerton reminiscences and their ilk to the dignity of detective novels, it must be said that the American field lay fallow from Poe's "Purloined Letter" (1844) to Anna Katharine Green's The Leavenworth Case (1878). Any number of reasons may have contributed to the length of the hiatus, not the least of which was a major internal war, more disrupting than any upheaval that England or even volatile France underwent during most of the same period. But the silence is of less interest or significance than the circumstances of its...