Anna Katharine Green, known as the “mother of the detective novel,” was one of the first American writers of detective fiction, making the genre popular a full decade before the first Sherlock Holmes story was published. She also introduced the concept of the “series detective” in the character of Ebenezer Gryce of the New York Metropolitan Police Force—and she also gave the world Miss Amelia Butterworth, a nosy spinster snoop who was the prototype for Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, among many others.
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