ANNA KATHARINE GREEN
The real Anna Katharine Green is a terrible mystery. We do not mean Mrs.
Charles Rohlfs of 156 Park Street, Buffalo, whose husband is an expert
maker of fine furniture and who wrote _Initials Only_ and _The
Leavenworth Case_. We mean the Anna Katharine Green Mind, a Mind no
longer young counted by years, a Mind as subtle and powerful and clever
as ever, counted by achievement. Read _The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow_,
published at the close of 1917, if you doubt that Mind’s unabated
mastery. Anna Katharine Green--but hush! What awe-inspiring quality
invests the mere whisper of that name? Why do cold shivers run up and
down our backs? Why in our commonplace surroundings--porch, porch
chairs, typewriter, manuscript--why, why do we chill all over? Why do
the thrills in dots and dashes like a hurrying Morse code torture our
nerves?
We will tell you.
It is because last night we opened a book and read:
I
WHERE IS BELA?
“A high and narrow gate of carefully joined boards, standing ajar
in a fence of the same construction! What is there in this to rouse
a whole neighborhood and collect before it a group of eager,
anxious, hesitating people?
“I will tell you.
“This fence is no ordinary fence, and this gate no ordinary gate;
nor is the fact of the latter standing a trifle open, one to be
lightly regarded or taken an inconsiderate advantage of. For this
is Judge Ostrander’s place....”
We read. And we read. The others retired for the night. The pale moon
swam slowly through the heavens, regarding us with a calm, cold
indifference. The town clock boomed midnight, then one, then two.
Fatality hung in the air. Horror coursed in the veins and the blood
ceased to pulse through the arteries. Occasionally a ripened apple
dropped from the nearby tree to the ground. At the thud we jumped. But
we could not stop until, on page 381, the last of _Dark Hollow_, we had
read the solemn words: “Peace for him; and for Reuther and Oliver,
hope!” Then we crept off to bed. Utter exhaustion of all sensation
brought swift sleep....
It must have been about a third of the way through that the conviction
stole over us of Judge Ostrander’s guilt. Who murdered Algernon
Etheridge in Dark Hollow? Did John Scoville, executed for the crime?
Did--shuddering thought--young Oliver Ostrander slay that friend of his
father’s whom he hated so? Neither ... neither! Then who? Why, the
unlikeliest person in the book, of course, and trust Anna Katharine
Green to make it plausible!
Mrs. Green--it is difficult to know whether to call Mrs. Rohlfs “Miss
Green” or “Mrs. Green”--Mrs. Green cannot write “for a cent,” as slang
has it; but she can write and has written for a good many dollars! And
by that we don’t mean her motive is purely businesslike; we prefer to
believe that she writes for the exercise of her marvelous and peculiar
talent, and to afford excitement and entertainment to many thousands who
read her books. What is this talent? (It is impossible in writing about
her to avoid falling into the theatricism of her narrative style!)
Did you ever try to write a mystery story? If you have tried you will
understand much better than we can tell you. And if you haven’t it will
be necessary to take a single specimen of Mrs. Green’s work to
illustrate her powers.
_Dark Hollow_--and she never wrote a more excellent yarn--centers about
the murder of Algernon Etheridge twelve years before the narrative
begins. John Scoville, keeper of a tavern, was tried and executed for
the crime, swearing his innocence. Etheridge was the closest personal
friend Judge Archibald Ostrander had. Circumstances compelled Judge
Ostrander to preside at Scoville’s trial and the Judge was not merely
impartial, but manifestly favored, so far as was compatible with
fairness, the defense. The evidence against Scoville was purely
circumstantial but strong. He had been in Dark Hollow that night at the
time of the crime. Etheridge was killed with Scoville’s stick.
Scoville’s character was bad.
For twelve years since the crime Judge Ostrander has lived shut off from
the world, except for his appearances on the bench. His grounds are
walled off by a high board fence within a high board fence and he lives
alone with a huge negro servant. His son and he have parted irrevocably.
When the story opens this negro, Bela, has gone forth on morning
errands, unprecedentedly leaving the gate in the fence ajar! A woman in
purple, heavily veiled, has entered the grounds. The gaping neighborhood
ventures in after her but does not find her. The crowd comes upon the
Judge sitting erect and apparently lifeless in his house! It is an
attack of catalepsy. A little later the negro, mortally wounded by an
automobile, returns and dies trying to guard the iron door in the house
which preserves his master’s secret.
The woman in purple turns out to be Mrs. Scoville. She sees the Judge
and tells him that his son, Oliver, has fallen in love with her
daughter, Reuther. She also tells him of her conviction that her husband
did not slay Etheridge. It is a conviction arrived at since his
execution. Late as it is, she is determined to do what she can to
uncover new evidence.
Chapter by chapter, piling sensation on sensation, Mrs. Green writes of
Mrs. Scoville’s quest. There is the shadow of the man in the peaked cap
seen advancing into Dark Hollow at the hour of the crime. There is the
picture of Oliver Ostrander secreted in his father’s house with a band
of black painted across the eyes. There is the point of a knife blade in
the stick with which Etheridge was killed, and the blade from which it
was broken lies folded in Oliver’s desk. A peaked cap hangs in Oliver’s
closet! Just when every circumstance drives home the conviction of
Oliver’s guilt Judge Ostrander shows Mrs. Scoville a written statement
that establishes the fact of an earlier murder by her husband. She is
taken all aback and for the moment she believes again that the right man
was put to death for the murder of Etheridge. But the Judge allows her
to look at the document a moment too long. It has been tampered with at
the close; forgery has been done!
Oliver must be found, for an accusation against him has got abroad and
the police are looking for him. There is a race between the agents of
the district attorney and the messengers of the Judge. He is found in a
remote spot in the Adirondacks and flees, but whether to return home at
his father’s summons or to escape to Canada, who knows? By a desperate
drop over the side of a cliff he has landed in a tree top. The train is
not due for fifteen minutes. He’ll catch it.
“‘The train south?’
“‘Yes, and the train north. They pass here.’”
Is it a return or a flight to escape? Thus, in chapter after chapter,
Mrs. Green creates new suspense, introduces new thrills. As each lesser
uncertainty is resolved a fresh one takes its place and always the great
major questions hang unanswered over her story--till the very close.
Then the one closed avenue to a solution is unbarred, the stunning
surprise is sprung and the curtain falls swiftly on a stupefying
dénouement. Between the big revelation and the very end of the tale
there is just time enough and just explanation enough to convince the
reader of what he would least have believed before.
This faint outline of a capital story illustrates Mrs. Green’s talent.
Now for the explanation. The whole art of it consists in a truly
infinite capacity for taking pains. Before writing this story it was
necessary to write, or get clearly in mind, the biographies of half a
dozen people. Their lives had to be fully known to the author, even to
innumerable incidents which would not be used in her story. Particularly
was it necessary to know every aspect in the past of the relations of
these people to each other.
It was next necessary to reconstruct the crime. A period of twenty
minutes or half an hour at a given place was under consideration. Where
was this place and where did it stand with respect to every other place
in the story--Judge Ostrander’s house, the Claymore Inn, the ruin of
Spencer’s Folly? A map had to be made. It is an illustration in the
book. But much more than a map was necessary. The exact whereabouts of
every one of half a dozen persons for the whole twenty minutes or half
hour had to be settled. Etheridge, Scoville, Mrs. Scoville, Oliver and
Judge Ostrander were all in or near Dark Hollow. Just where was each at
every moment? Just what was each doing? Just what could, and did, each
say and do and hear and see? The author must know _all_ these things in
order to spare the reader what is irrelevant. She must have every inch
of the ground at her fingertips and every instant clear. You don’t
believe this? Try writing a story like _Dark Hollow_, improvising as you
go along, or working from a mere outline, and see what happens to you!
The only improvisation in such work as Mrs. Green’s is in respect of
what might be called chapter climaxes--the brief thrills, one or more to
a chapter, which arise, administer their shock to the reader’s nerves,
and are cleared up some pages later. Many of these are planned in
advance, a few suggest themselves as the writer goes along, others are
real inspirations which have suggested themselves during the writing and
are substituted for planned but less effective climaxes. Such is the
incident cited above where two trains, one bound south and the other
bound for Canada, meet and pass at the little mountain station.
It is frequently said that the whole art of a mystery story or detective
story of the kind Mrs. Green writes is to direct suspicion at every
person except the right one, until the end! This is clever and partly
true, but it takes no account of the vast amount of construction which
must go forward before a sentence of the story can be put on paper; it
ignores the fact that the criminal, to be convincing, must have figured
in the story from the start, for otherwise he will appear as a desperate
invention to help the author out of an otherwise insoluble situation.
Looking at _Dark Hollow_ in retrospect it is quite easy to see why
certain things had to be--so. Judge Ostrander had to be the murderer
because he was the person least likely to kill his dearest friend.
Oliver had to be under suspicion to make Judge Ostrander’s confession
plausible. The Judge had to be the murderer, furthermore, that Reuther
Scoville might not be an unfit person to become the wife of Oliver.
Oliver had to be cleared that he might be fit to mate with Reuther! Yes,
yes; but all this wisdom after the event gets nowhere. It does not
penetrate to the heart of the action and throws no light on the author’s
cunning. Do you suppose for a moment that she made her story out of such
nice little expediencies as these? You can’t build a story that way. It
won’t hold together for a moment.
No! The real starting point in _Dark Hollow_ was the conception on the
part of Mrs. Green of a man who should, in a moment’s fit of passion,
slay his closest friend and who should thereafter, for twelve years,
inflict on himself a peculiar punishment, imprisoning himself in a
convict’s cell _in his own home_! All the rest--the painting of a black
band across the eyes of his son’s portrait that they might not look on
his father, murderer and coward; the sending of that son away from home
for all time; the building of a double fence to guard against intrusion
by so much as an eye at a knothole--all these followed. Then on this
solid foundation of a single life, a single idea, a single stricken
conscience arose, course by course, the complicated and wonderful (but
solid and sound) structure of the book.
That is the talent of Anna Katharine Green, explained, analyzed and
illustrated. Things there are about it that cannot be explained or
analyzed. These we pass. We have said that she cannot write. It is true.
_The Leavenworth Case_, and _The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow_ and _Dark
Hollow_--every one of her many books is wretchedly written, full of
trite and cheap expressions, full of cliches, dotted with ludicrous
trifles of thought and expression, spotted with absurdities, as where
the negro Bela is struck and fatally injured by an automobile at the
outset of _Dark Hollow_. The car inflicted a terrible gash in his head
and we are informed that “it took a sixty horsepower racing machine
going at a high rate of speed to kill him”! And then it didn’t do it
instantaneously! If Mrs. Green could have had a collaborator with only
average literary skill she would carry everything irresistibly before
her. Her mind, joined to a pen capable of writing freshly, simply, with
dramatic effect but without theatricism, without sentimental
mawkishness, would have achieved books to be put on the shelf alongside
the stories of Poe, classical, perfect, immortal.
But if she is not immortal she will live a long, long time! Without ever
having created a character to compare with Sherlock Holmes she has
constructed tales more baffling than any of the crimes Sir Conan Doyle’s
detective solved. She has not had to resort to exotic coloring as Doyle
has sometimes had to do to conceal thinness of story. She has not had to
depend upon abstruse mathematical ciphers and codes as Poe did in _The
Goldbug_. She has not had to carry us through generations and
coincidences as Gaboriau did in _File No. 113_. She never employs the
fanciful inversions and mystical paradoxes by which Gilbert K.
Chesterton establishes, not so much the existence of crime and
criminals, as _The Innocence of Father Brown_. She can handle more
complex strands than Melville Davisson Post. But Mr. Post can write
rings around her! When we get the Anna Katharine Green Mind and the
Melville Davisson Post Art joined in a single person America will
produce the detective and mystery stories not of a decade nor of a
generation but of all time. Meanwhile let us give Mrs. Green her due. In
her way, and we have tried to show her way and to differentiate it from
the ways of others, she is the most accomplished story-teller in
American literary history. She is unique, and with anything unique it is
well to be satisfied!
BOOKS BY ANNA KATHARINE GREEN
_The Leavenworth Case._ A. L. Burt Company, New York.
_A Strange Disappearance._
_The Sword of Damocles._
_Hand and Ring._
_The Mill Mystery._
_Marked “Personal.”_
_Miss Hurd--An Enigma._
_Behind Closed Doors._
_Cynthia Wakeham’s Money._
_Dr. Izard._
_The Old Stone House and Other Stories._
_7 to 12._
_X. Y. Z._
_The Doctor, His Wife and the Clock._
_That Affair Next Door._
_Lost Man’s Lane._
_Agatha Webb._
_Risifi’s Daughter: A Drama._
_A Difficult Problem and Other Stories._
_The Circular Study._ Doubleday, Page & Company.
_One of My Sons._
_The Filigree Ball._ Bobbs-Merrill Company.
_The Defense of the Bride and Other Poems_, 1894.
G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York.
_The Millionaire Baby_, 1905. Burt.
_The House in the Mist_, 1905. Bobbs-Merrill Co.
_The Amethyst Box_, 1905. Bobbs-Merrill Co.
_The Chief Legatee_, 1906. Dodd, Mead & Company, New York.
_The Mayor’s Wife_, 1907. Bobbs-Merrill Co.
_Three Thousand Dollars_, 1909.
_The House of the Whispering Pines_, 1910. Putnam’s. Burt.
_Initials Only_, 1911. Dodd, Mead. Burt. Reprinted in
the Army and Navy Library of Detective Fiction, 1918.
_Masterpieces of Mystery_, 1912. Dodd, Mead. Republished
in 1919 as _Room No. 3._ Dodd, Mead.
_Dark Hollow_, 1914. Dodd, Mead. Burt.
_The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange_, 1915.
_The Woman in the Alcove_, 1916. Burt.
_The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow_, 1917. Dodd, Mead.
_The Step on the Stair, or, You Are the Man_, 1922. Dodd, Mead.