It's pretty funny, since I'm the one who works in technology, that my wife is more interested in the new hand-held electronic toys than I am. Having procured for herself a bargain-priced iPad (from a relative who no longer wanted it), she passed her Kindle along to me. I don't like reading on it anywhere near as much as I like reading a book--there's really no competition--but its portability is awfully handy sometimes, and I often take it with me when there's a chance that I'll be stuck somewhere with nothing to do.

Most of the books on it were put there by my wife when she was using it. And that's how I came to read this novel, both book and author having been previously unknown to me. Anna Katharine Green (Wikipedia article) was an early practitioner of the detective novel, and The Leavenworth Case was her first.  Since it predates the first Sherlock Holmes novel by roughly ten years (1878 vs. 1887), that certainly makes it a very early instance, although I gather from the Wikipedia article not the first.

After the first five pages or so, I wasn't sure I wanted to continue. But then I became interested in it purely as a period piece, and then after a couple of chapters became interested, period, and wanted to find out what happened. I can see why Green has been mostly forgotten, while Doyle is as famous as ever, if not more so. Neither Green's detective nor her story is as memorable as Holmes and most of the Holmes stories. The style is melodramatic to say the least:

Turning my head, I followed the guiding of that uplifted hand, now frozen into its place by a new emotion: the emotion of being interrupted in the midst of a direful and pregnant revelation, and saw—but, no, here description fails me! Eleanore Leavenworth must be painted by other hands than mine. I could sit half the day and dilate upon the subtle grace, the pale magnificence, the perfection of form and feature which make Mary Leavenworth the wonder of all who behold her; but Eleanore—I could as soon paint the beatings of my own heart. Beguiling, terrible, grand, pathetic, that face of faces flashed upon my gaze, and instantly the moonlight loveliness of her cousin faded from my memory, and I saw only Eleanore....

But it's still worth reading, partly in itself and partly, as I first felt, as a period piece. In the latter capacity it's an interesting view of wealthy New York Anglo-Protestant society at its highest point of cultural dominance and prestige, between roughly the Civil War and the First World War. The narrator, for instance, the Leavenworth's family lawyer, is much concerned with his status and prerogatives as a gentleman, perhaps even more so than a contemporary Englishman would have been. But there's a subtle criticism there, because the detective is not a gentleman, in that strict social sense.

Green also created the first "girl detective," giving her the very interesting name of Violet Strange, and there is one of these books on the Kindle, too, which I will sample sooner or later.