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As the "mother of detective fiction" and the most famous American mystery writer in her day, Anna Katharine Green helped to develop a popular genre. Arguably the next important writer to work in the genre after Edgar Allan Poe, the New York author's impressive corpus pleased mystery fans for almost half a century. Some of her books were translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Danish, Swedish, and Dutch. While Green's poetry and drama are justly forgotten, novels of detection such as The Leavenworth Case: A Lawyer's Story (1878) can still keep readers guessing. Also gripping are Green's ingenious tales of crimes that revolve around such devices as deadly mechanical hands and fatal daggers made of melting ice. Most significant, Green is remembered for her early and perceptive explorations of the criminal mind and heart. "I do not put the emphasis on the manner of the act," she observed in "Why Human Beings Are Interested in Crime," an article published in the February 1919 issue of American Magazine, "but on the motives behind it and on the novel and strange situations which come in working out the mystery."
Born to New Englanders resident in Brooklyn on 11 November 1846, Green was a staunch Presbyterian all her life, and it is possible that religious faith helped inculcate the quality that Wilkie Collins praised as her "sincerity" in an 1883 letter to George Putnam, which Putnam published in the 28 January 1893 issue of The Critic.
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