(1846–1935), known variously as the mother, grandmother, and godmother of the American detective story, has popularly and famously been credited with writing the first American detective novel by a woman, The Leavenworth Case (1878). The fact that her novel was preceded by The Dead Letter in 1867, by Seeley Regester (the nom de plume of Metta Victoria Fuller Victor), is significant mainly to historians and pedants, as The Dead Letter sank without notice while The Leavenworth Case became one of the bestselling detective novels of the nineteenth century.
That landmark novel introduced Ebenezer Gryce, a stolid, competent, and colorless policeman who bears many of the characteristics of Charles Dickens’s Inspector Bucket (from Bleak House, 1852–1853) and Wilkie Collins’s Sergeant Cuff (from The Moonstone, 1868). Gryce, dignified and gentle, inspires confidence even in those he interrogates. The enormous success of The Leavenworth Case induced Green to invent many more mysteries for Gryce to solve, including A Strange Disappearance (1880) and Hand and Ring (1883); the last, The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow (1917), was published forty years after the first.
Green also was one of the first authors to produce female detective protagonists, notably Amelia Butterworth, who often worked with Gryce and was of a higher social standing than the policeman, thereby allowing him access to a level of society that otherwise might have presented difficulties, and Violet Strange, a beautiful and wealthy young woman employed by a private detective agency who accepted cases only if they interested her.
“An Intangible Clew” was originally published in The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange (New York, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915).