That Affair Next Door by Anna Katharine Green

 Anna Katharine Green has been called the mother of American detective fiction, and she did do a lot to influence the fiction of the authors who came after her probably including the Miss Marple stories by Agatha Christie. The Affair Next Door was published in 1897. It was the 8th in a series of books written by Anna Katarine Green about the police inspector Ebenezer Gryce. The first book in this series was The Leavenworth Case written in 1878 and which has been called the first American mystery novel written by a woman, but it was not. The first book was The Dead Letter written by Metta Victoria Fuller in 1866.  There are two more Amelia Butterworth books in this series.

 Amelia Butterworth is the narrator of this book, and it is through her eyes and her opinions that we will see the persons and the events. Amelia thought of  herself as "Miss Butterworth, of Colonial ancestry and no inconsiderable importance in the social world". Her age is given as "middle aged" or sometimes as old. She lives alone in a house in an affluent neighborhood. She does not hesitate to share her opinions of others. She found the coroner's jury to be composed of "ninnies". She finds young people to be irresponsible. She looks down on the lower classes. She is sharp minded and thinks clearly, and is instrumental in finding a solution to the crime. In spite of her prejudices, I liked her for her honesty about herself.

Amelia Butterworth had gone to bed, but when she heard a carriage stop at the Van Burnam's house next door, she sprang to window to see what was going on because the house was supposed to be empty. A man and a woman got out of the carriage, the woman paid the driver, and they entered the house after some difficulty with the key. Ten minutes later she saw the man leave the house and start hurrying away. The woman was not with him. Amelia wondered why he had left the woman in what appeared to totally dark house.

The next morning, her curiosity got the better of Amelia, and she went next door and knocked on the door. Nobody answered. The shutters all seemed to securely locked. Amelia went to a passing policeman and told him her suspicions, but he said he could do nothing. Then a cleaning lady approached them. She said that the Van Burnams would be returning soon and she was to open and air out the house. She used her keys to open the door, and all three entered the house. What they found was the body of a dead woman. The body lay under a heavy cabinet which had been overturned on top of her which seemed to be the cause of her death. They asked a passerby to summon a police detective and the coroner.

In this way, Amelia made the acquaintance of Mr. Gryce of the police department. He was a man in his seventies and a veteran of the police department. As Amelia's curiosity drew her into investigating the case on her own, her conversations with Gryce grew more spirited. Then Amelia tried to keep her findings about the case from Gryce for they had developed a competition for determination of the murderer.

The Van Burnams were a wealthy family of a leather manufacturer. There were two sons in the family, Franklin and Howard, and two daughters, Carolina and Isabella. Franklin was the good son, upright, well behaved, and suitably married. Howard, on the other hand, was the black sheep of the family. He had married a woman whom the family had decided was beneath their station in life. Howard, because of this, was drummed out of the family and the business. Initially, the dead body was thought to be the body of Howard's wife, but he would not look at the body to determine if it was or not.

Both Amelia and the police continue their investigations. On the whole, Amelia is the most successful. Bare in mind that this was a book which was written at a time when women were trying to gain the vote, and better opportunities. Amelia is against the vote for women, but she enjoys getting out of her restricted life in the upper class and doing her investigations. The clothing the characters are wearing plays an important part in the story, and Amelia is a much better judge of clothing than is Gryce. It was also a time of the desire for upward mobility in the lower classes, and this desire would play a prominent part for some of the characters in this novel. This mystery novel contains episodes of mistaken identity, and family disputes which were similar to other novels written at this time. I think that reader of this book will find it interesting for its own sake and interesting to see how it fits into the development of the mystery genre.