The Leavenworth Case

A rich old man is shot in his library, the household is locked in with the body, and the case turns on a lie told by a niece. Anna Katharine Green published it in 1878, nine years before Sherlock Holmes; it sold three-quarters of a million copies, and Yale used it to teach law students how circumstantial evidence misleads. Fifty plates of painting from Eastman Johnson to James McNeill Whistler catch the hush of a locked room and the slow work of evidence, matching the novel's quiet, circumstantial turn.