No! The real starting point in Dark Hollow was the conception on the part of Mrs. Green of a man who should, in a moment’s fit of passion, slay his closest friend and who should thereafter, for twelve years, inflict on himself a peculiar punishment, imprisoning himself in a convict’s cell in his own home! All the rest—the painting of a black band across the eyes of his son’s portrait that they might not look on his father, murderer and coward; the sending of that son away from home for all time; the building of a double fence to guard against intrusion by so much as an eye at a knothole—all these followed. Then on this solid foundation of a single life, a single idea, a single stricken conscience arose, course by course, the complicated and wonderful (but solid and sound) structure of the book.
That is the talent of Anna Katharine Green, explained, analyzed and illustrated. Things there are about it that cannot be explained or analyzed. These we pass. We have said that she cannot write. It is true. The Leavenworth Case, and The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow and Dark Hollow—every one of her many books is wretchedly written, full of trite and cheap expressions, full of cliches, dotted with ludicrous trifles of thought and expression, spotted with absurdities, as where the negro Bela is struck and fatally injured by an automobile at the outset of Dark Hollow. The car inflicted a terrible gash in his head and we are informed that “it took a sixty horsepower racing machine going at a high rate of speed to kill him”! And then it didn’t do it instantaneously! If Mrs. Green could have had a collaborator with only average literary skill she would carry everything irresistibly before her. Her mind, joined to a pen capable of writing freshly, simply, with dramatic effect but without theatricism, without sentimental mawkishness, would have achieved books to be put on the shelf alongside the stories of Poe, classical, perfect, immortal.
But if she is not immortal she will live a long, long time! Without ever having created a character to compare with Sherlock Holmes she has constructed tales more baffling than any of the crimes Sir Conan Doyle’s detective solved. She has not had to resort to exotic coloring as Doyle has sometimes had to do to conceal thinness of story. She has not had to depend upon abstruse mathematical ciphers and codes as Poe did in The Goldbug. She has not had to carry us through generations and coincidences as Gaboriau did in File No. 113. She never employs the fanciful inversions and mystical paradoxes by which Gilbert K. Chesterton establishes, not so much the existence of crime and criminals, as The Innocence of Father Brown. She can handle more complex strands than Melville Davisson Post. But Mr. Post can write rings around her! When we get the Anna Katharine Green Mind and the Melville Davisson Post Art joined in a single person America will produce the detective and mystery stories not of a decade nor of a generation but of all time. Meanwhile let us give Mrs. Green her due. In her way, and we have tried to show her way and to differentiate it from the ways of others, she is the most accomplished story-teller in American literary history. She is unique, and with anything unique it is well to be satisfied!
Books by Anna Katharine Green
The Leavenworth Case. A. L. Burt Company, New York.
A Strange Disappearance.
The Sword of Damocles.
Hand and Ring.
The Mill Mystery.
Marked “Personal.”
Miss Hurd—An Enigma.
Behind Closed Doors.
Cynthia Wakeham’s Money.
Dr. Izard.
The Old Stone House and Other Stories.
7 to 12.
X. Y. Z.
The Doctor, His Wife and the Clock.
That Affair Next Door.
Lost Man’s Lane.
Agatha Webb.
Risifi’s Daughter: A Drama.
A Difficult Problem and Other Stories.
The Circular Study. Doubleday, Page & Company.
One of My Sons.
The Filigree Ball. Bobbs-Merrill Company.
The Defense of the Bride and Other Poems, 1894. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York.
The Millionaire Baby, 1905. Burt.
The House in the Mist, 1905. Bobbs-Merrill Co.
The Amethyst Box, 1905. Bobbs-Merrill Co.
The Chief Legatee, 1906. Dodd, Mead & Company, New York.
The Mayor’s Wife, 1907. Bobbs-Merrill Co.
Three Thousand Dollars, 1909.
The House of the Whispering Pines, 1910. Putnam’s. Burt.
Initials Only, 1911. Dodd, Mead. Burt. Reprinted in the Army and Navy Library of Detective Fiction, 1918.
Masterpieces of Mystery, 1912. Dodd, Mead. Republished in 1919 as Room No. 3. Dodd, Mead.
Dark Hollow, 1914. Dodd, Mead. Burt.
The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange, 1915.
The Woman in the Alcove, 1916. Burt.
The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow, 1917. Dodd, Mead.
The Step on the Stair, or, You Are the Man, 1922. Dodd, Mead.
CHAPTER XVII
HELEN R. MARTIN
A CHAPTER on Helen R. Martin can hardly be anything but a prolonged interview, or a pieced interview, somewhat like a patchwork quilt, constructed from talks of various persons with her at various times. And always on the same subject—her subject—the Pennsylvania Dutch.
What there is to say about the writer and her work shall first be said. She is the daughter of the Rev. Cornelius Reimensnyder, who came from Germany to accept the pastorate of Lancaster county, so the daughter was brought up among the Mennonites. She has written a novel every year or so for the last fourteen years, writing in the time left over after taking care of her home and her children, a boy and a girl; canvassing for suffrage and campaigning for Socialism. Her home is in Harrisburg, the capital of Pennsylvania. Her first novel was not of the people among whom she had spent her life but “a romance of life as she would like it to be.” Fortunately it did not sell, so she was led to look about her for her future material. She did not begin to write until she met Frederick R. Martin, to whom she was afterward married. He is an instructor in music. And Mrs. Martin was herself a teacher. At one time she taught children in a fashionable private school in New York City. She knew the youngsters rather better than their parents.
Mrs. Martin, like Marjorie Benton Cooke and Harriet T. Comstock, is interested in social questions. She has decided views on bringing up children, wealth and poverty; she does not subscribe to Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s views of motherhood; she is not a feminist in any general meaning of the word, because she believes that feminism in many of its aspects is a passing phase. As a rule her preoccupation with these problems is kept out of her work—the older generation of the people she wrote about were blandly unaware that such questions reared their heads—but her last two novels, Gertie Swartz: Fanatic or Christian? and Maggie of Virginsburg, introduce them extensively and disastrously. Mrs. Martin’s failure with Gertie Swartz arose entirely from her inability to assimilate such matter before writing her story. As a result industrial conditions and employees’ welfare are indigestible lumps in the novel. Some subjects cannot be introduced bodily into a piece of fiction. They must arise as they arise in life out of situations and character. They cannot be discussed in a story as they are discussed from a platform. They can only act upon the people of the tale or be acted upon by them; they can be discussed, if the representation of life is to be fairly accurate, only to the extent that the situations of the story call for. It is true that life contains many futile and windy discussions, some academic, some not; but the only things that count are those which involve action or precipitate action or express or mold character. The novelist must exclude all else, otherwise the novel will lack illusion and resemble nothing so much as the minutes of the last meeting of the Society for the Suppression of Sociological Sores.
Gertie Swartz aside, the real controversy over Mrs. Martin’s work arises from her studies of Pennsylvania Dutch life, and is of a sort to give satisfaction to her as a writer. For the very nature of the controversy carries with it the plain implication that she has got under the skin of her people. It is alleged and deposed that she does not do the Pennsylvania Dutch justice. The allegation was most completely made in the New York Evening Post for April 29, 1916, by Isaac R. Pennypacker.