Audiobook · read by volunteers
À Strange Disappearance
Anna Katharine Green (1846–1935)
Read by Nichole Karl, J. M. Smallheer, Lucy Burgoyne (1950-2014), Laura Caldwell, Sibella Denton, Great Plains, Wina Hathaway, Maire Rhode, Kristin Hughes (1974-2021) · 20 chapters · 5 h 35
About the book
A man vanishes, and the police and the newspapers cannot explain it. The investigation moves from small, stubborn clues to larger and stranger ones: the contents of a bureau drawer, a bit of calico, a house at a crossroads, the secret of a studio, a New York belle whose name keeps returning. Anna Katharine Green, sometimes called the mother of American detective fiction, builds her story with patient care. Clues are laid out with a lawyer’s precision, suspects multiply, and chapter after chapter adds a new layer of doubt before the answers come. The atmosphere is that of a Victorian parlour in which something is badly wrong, and the pace is deliberate. This is an early American mystery of real charm, one that rewards close listening and keeps you guessing to the end.
Introduction
Anna Katharine Green was born in Brooklyn in 1846 and died in 1935. She is regarded as one of the first American writers of detective fiction, and her first novel, The Leavenworth Case, published in 1878, was a great success. It was said to be admired by lawyers for its accuracy, and Green herself, the daughter of a lawyer, took care to get legal details right. She went on to write dozens of books, and her fictional detective Ebenezer Gryce is considered a forerunner of later series sleuths.
The Strange Disappearance followed in 1880. Like her other novels, it is long and carefully planned, with an emphasis on reasoning and on the evidence at hand. Readers who enjoy the golden age of the whodunit will recognise many of the ingredients, but they will also find that Green’s style is more formal and slower, in keeping with the manners of her time.
The LibriVox recording has twenty sections and runs for about five and a half hours. It is read by several volunteers, who take the story in turn. If you like puzzles, closed circles of suspects and the pleasure of following an old-fashioned inquiry step by step, this book is a good introduction to a writer who deserves to be better known.
Part of the pleasure of an early detective novel is seeing how the rules of the genre were being worked out. Green explains her clues with great care and she is fond of courtroom scenes and drawing-room confrontations. If you enjoy a story in which the answer lies hidden in plain sight, you will be well served.
Public domain
Anna Katharine Green died in 1935: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text