Sisters on the Case

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Women writers and their detectives have been an important part of crime fiction since its beginnings. Who doesn’t know Miss Marple or Peter Wimsey or Ebenezer Gryce and Amelia Butterworth? Wait: Butterworth? Gryce? Those aren’t household names.

A century ago, they were. Both were detectives created by Anna Katherine Green, one of the most successful crime writers of the last hundred years. At a time when America’s population was a quarter what it is today, Green’s books usually sold around a million copies. She was President Wilson’s favorite genre writer, she knew all the luminaries of the day, and her detective, Ebenezer Gryce, anticipated Sherlock Holmes by a decade.

Gryce did the same kind of forensic research as Holmes, examining medical evidence, typefaces, fabrics, buttons, and drawing conclusions based on physical evidence. Green was the first English-language writer to create that most beloved figure in crime fiction: the series character, whose insights and foibles are opaque to other figures in the story, but well-known to the reader.

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