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Amelia Butterworth is a feisty, nosy woman of a certain age. She has a tongue like a razor, a penchant for looking out of windows and nothing escapes her eagle eye, which comes in useful when a murder is committed in the house next door. The posh Van Burnam family are away, but Amelia spots a man and woman going into the house late at night. The next day, a young woman is found dead beneath a cabinet. The formidable Amelia barges her way into the enquiry like a galleon in full sail, ignoring the sarcasm of detective Ebenezer Gryce. With people trailing in her slipstream round the shops and houses of 19th century New York, she solves the mystery of what happened that night. Half the fun of the two books in this reissued collection is Amelia's sparring with elderly detective Mr Gryce -- and she generally gets the better of him. More so than any modern feminist heroine, she has a low opinion of men and a high opinion of her own abilities. She has a sharp tongue and a way with the one-liners -- I particularly liked her waspish comment "I realized it would never do for me to lose my wits in the presence of a man who had none too many of his own." THAT AFFAIR NEXT DOOR (1897) stands comparison with a good many of the best books of the Golden Age. It's a fairly conventional plot -- nosy amateur bests the detectives -- but is set aside by the fresh, funny and feisty tone of its lead character. LOST MAN'S LANE, by comparison, is much more gothic in tone and has echoes of Conan Doyle, with haunted houses and mysterious characters in disguise skulking around. In LOST MAN'S LANE (1898), Amelia travels out of the city to visit the bizarre children of her late friend Althea. People have been disappearing from the lane of the title -- and the family's tumbledown, creepy mansion just happen to be situated there. The resourceful Amelia, equipped with enough useful bits and bobs in her luggage to shame a boy scout, naturally gets to the bottom of both the disappearances and the family members' eccentric behaviour. Thanks to Catherine Ross Nickerson's excellent forward, we learn that Green was the best known and most prolific crime writer in the United States before Dashiell Hammett, publishing her books into the 1920s. Best known for THE LEAVENWORTH CASE (1878), Green created the first female detective in American fiction. But she was not exactly a progressive woman, compared with fellow 19th century female writer Metta Fuller Victor (whose reissued books in the same series were reviewed here recently), as Green was apparently anti-Suffrage. But this volume is a must-read, mainly for its sparky, opinionated and very funny leading character. Amelia more than holds her own amongst the nosy spinsters of the Golden Age and beyond.
Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, February 2004
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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