A review by losthitsu
The Leavenworth Case by Anna Katharine Green

4.0

This would be a pretty box standard murder mystery with forged letters, red herrings, mistaken identities and a shocking final reveal - if it wasn't written in 1878, which means that it predates pretty much everything from the genre including Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. I don't understand why we date anglophone murder mysteries to Collins' Moonstone - a rambling novel with a fairly absurd investigation hidden in it if you look hard enough - but ignore something like this, which clearly sets the blueprint for tropes that reappear in pretty much every murder mystery written in the past century and a half.