"The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow" by Anna Katharine Green
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It is the noon hour at a museum in New York City. The date: May 23, 1913. The weekday, attendance is light; the attendees are scattered between two floors. Suddenly a cry rings out from the second floor. Scrambling to Section II, the museum director discovers a teenage girl dead with an arrow through her heart. An older woman hovers over her whispering incoherent phrases in the girl's ear and offering incomprehensible answers to the director's questions. She is the only witness to the crime, or accident, as the case may be. How will the feeble, 83 year-old Mr. Gryce unravel this mystery when this witness is apparently insane?
Anna Katharine Green was noted for her scientific approach to the murder mystery. In The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow she breaks more ground with her in-depth study of the psychological interplay between the murderer, the victim and the witnesses. Although more quietly paced, this mystery presents many elements of a current psychological thriller: blind ambition, narcissism, obsession and betrayal. Green adds a peculiar twist with the fact that two heartbroken relatives of the victim sacrifice virtually everything to protect the murderer.
The story leans heavily on the "woman as victim" theme, a concept that may have fallen from favor as the years have passed and women have become more their own persons rather than someone's wife. Here, Green plumbed the depths of women's motivations, leading the reader through a realm more fascinating than the motivations of the actual perpetrator. In doing so, she paints a horrific vision of Gryce's pursuit one somewhat peripheral character for questioning. The chapter is aptly called "Terror" and would make a marvelous movie scene involving a yawning ravine, a narrow and unreliable bridge and a dark, stormy night. More unfathomable than the ravine itself is the reason that the woman, who was in no way suspected of the crime, would make such a desperate attempt to avoid being found and questioned.
A murder mystery by nature actively engages the reader more than a romance or adventure because the reader becomes involved in picking up clues and ultimately predicting the resolution of the story. Green realized this fact and invited the reader to become part of the investigative team, offering a set of diagrams that picture in three dimensions where the victim and each attendee was located at the time that the cry of murder rang out. (These diagrams are included in the ebook and also available as a printable PDF document so that the reader can follow along as locations are mentioned.) The diagrams are interesting to follow, but not all that necessary for the enjoyment of the story.
Hasty Arrow is a satisfying mystery because Green carefully ties up every small clue and explains every motivation in this strange story. When I finished reading the book, the only mystery left in my mind was why Agatha Christie is a household word and Anna Katharine Green is not.
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"The story leans heavily on the “woman as victim” theme, a concept that may have fallen from favor as the years have passed and women have become more their own persons rather than someone’s wife"
It's this sort of ridiculous rhetoric that makes literary criticism worthless in relation to the literature it pretends to hold authority of; women are victims quite often...read the newspapers if you don't believe this fact. Men are too. Literature reflects more than the absurdly biased and hysterical ideals of a very few.
This novel and others like it are wonderful in spite of these types of comments; too bad we can't hear only about the novel without the political jabberings of bitter know-it-alls.
I urge all to read the novel(and all others) for what it is...not for how it fits contemporary values.
“The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow” undoubtedly is wonderful. But did you read it? If so, you know that the real “victims” of this story are other than the murder victim. The “victim hood” of the murder victim was not significantly different from that of any other victim in a murder mystery—male or female.
However, the two bereaved women about whom Green undertakes her lengthy psychological study became victims long before the murder took place and continue thus long after Mr. Gryce’s begins his investigation. In fact, their actions (and in-actions) may have laid the groundwork for the events that led up to the murder. Like Lily Bart in “The House of Mirth,” (http://girlebooks.com/free-ebooks/the-house-of-mirth-by-edith-wharton/) the first bereaved woman felt trapped by her circumstances. This woman was ensnared by her past to such an extent that instead of gleefully fingering the perpetrator to Mr. Gryce and the coroner, she felt compelled to protect this person at great personal sacrifice. The other bereaved woman took up her friend’s cause at even greater personal sacrifice. This kind of sacrifice scarcely makes sense now, but it most certainly did in Green’s (and in Wharton’s) time when women had fewer choices regarding marriage and career.
Whether Green was making a political statement or simply showing that things were changing for women is not for this “know-it-all” to say. Green’s professional background, had already demonstrated that she was able to make professional as well as personal choices, and did so quite successfully. Not only was she an acclaimed novelist; she also partnered with her husband, Charles Rohlfs, in designing the furniture that made him famous. (More about this in my review of “The Leavenworth Case” http://girlebooks.com/free-ebooks/the-leavenworth-case-by-anna-katharine-green/.)
The point this “know-it-all” was trying to make has little to do with politics and much to do with history. As society’s mores change, people of either gender can more easily make choices that were difficult, if not to say impossible, in previous decades. The “woman as victim” theme as it played out here, would not work in a novel using a contemporary setting. The reason is not that no one cares, or that politics has changed, but that history has changed society to a point that the novel’s outcome would have had to be different to be believable.
If I talk in riddles, I apologize. To put too fine a point on this discussion would be to give away too much of Green’s amazing and forward-thinking story. If anyone wants more details, we can open a forum topic with a “spoiler warning” for those who don’t want to be told the end before they have read the book.
If a contrasting contemporary novel would illustrate the march of history more than my “worthless rhetoric,” keep an eye out for “Alaskan Healing” by Lana Voynich, soon to be published by GirleBooks. The protagonist, Shawn Nilsen, must deal with some of the same issues as Green’s bereaved victim, and does so in a way that Green, in spite of her forward-looking style, might never have imagined.
The book I mention in my previous comment is now available on GirleBooks. If you would like to read about it, here is the link:
http://girlebooks.com/book-reviews/alaskan-healing-by-lana-voynich/