Monday, February 10, 2014

Faint Praise for Anna Katharine Green

This critic's opinion notwithstanding, Green kept on writing:
By no stretch of the imagination can any of Anna Katharine Green's novels be ranked as literature; with the makers of great detective stories—Poe, Gaboriau and Doyle—she has little in common; nevertheless, for work of a certain kind she enjoys a wide and well-deserved popularity.
In a crude way Anna Katharine Green possesses a very strong sense of sensational dramatic effect. Few writers to-day can handle mystery and assassination so picturesquely and effectively.
Even in the days of The Leavenworth Case and Behind Closed Doors she had thoroughly mastered the mechanism of the detective story, and if, as has been said, types such as Dupin and Lecoq and Tir au Clair and Sherlock Holmes are far beyond her powers; in Ebenezer Gryce and his young assistant she has constructed two excellent sleuths of the second order of merit. — "Chronicle and Comment: Anna Katharine Green," THE BOOKMAN (July 1902)
Resources:
- The GAD Wiki entry for Green.
- Another ONTOS posting HERE.

Category: Detective fiction

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