The Cases of Violet Strange by Anna Katharine Green

In this collection of stories published in 1915, Anna Katharine Green presents a new detective to the mystery reading public. This detective is a young woman in the upper levels of society who is employed by a private investigator to investigate mysteries involving women. Her motivation for doing this are not clear to him. She seems to have money, yet she is strongly tempted to take a case which she does not want in order to acquire money. Her employer  "knew that she wanted money - that was her avowed reason for entering into this uncongenial work. But to want it so much." She is described as a "small, slight woman" and as "vivacity incarnate ... light as thistledown in fibre and in feeling", but there were moments when "a woman's lofty soul shone through her odd, bewildering features."

I will describe only three cases, but these three do show the range of Violet's detection. In her first case, The Golden Slipper" she is employed to investigate what are supposed to be thefts of various items from homes and stores by a young woman from a upper class family. This is what we would now call kleptomania. Violet is quite successful in this because her young age allows her to get to know the young woman and her friends. She is also successful because of a clever trick which enables her to find the real thief.

Her second case, The Second Bullet, is much more serious. A man is said to committed suicide by shooting himself. When he fell down, he fell upon his very young child and killed him. The man's wife does not believe that it was suicide, and also would not receive any insurance if it were. Violet's ability to observe closely and reason well leads to a reasonable conclusion.

Her fourth case, The Grotto Spectre, seems to me, to sheer melodrama. She is approached by a man who seems to be terribly distraught. His distressed appearance attracted her attention immediately even in a crowd. His name is Roger Upjohn, he is upper class, and his story has caused him to be looked down upon by his friends. He tells her his story of how he fell in love with an extremely attractive woman. He was totally fascinated with her and married her even though his father did not approve. I believe that in stories of this period if the family does not approve of a marriage, that marriage will lead to disaster. And indeed it does. The man and his wife shared a love of gambling even though his father did not approve. Their gambling lead to even more dire consequences and to the death of his wife. Roger feared that his father had murdered his wife and he wanted Violet Strange to find out what really happened.

It is easy to see how Violet Strange could be an influence upon the development of Nancy Drew. I have not found any link and this could be impossible to do because there is no one person writing the Nancy Drew books. The first Nancy Drew book was published in 1930. It was written by ghostwriters and published under the name of Carolyn Keene by the Stratemeyer Publishing Company. There is only 15 years between the publication of these two books. These stories were written late in Green's writing career. She was born in 1846, and died in 1935. The Violet Strange stories were published in 1915, and Green wrote little after this. She married Charles Rohifs in 1884. They had three children. Even if she wrote little more after 1915, she exerted a strong influence in the development of the mystery novel.