The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange

One of Author Anna Katharine Green's innovations was the idea of the "girl detective," in the person of
Violet Strange. Violet was a 17-year-old high-society debutante who led a double
life as a sleuth, working for an unnamed detective agency to discreetly ferret out
solutions to mysteries that could not be trusted to the police. The short stories in
this collection give us a glimpse into New York society, filled with musicales and
teas and ballgowns, but neither the tales nor Violet are light-hearted and fluffy.
Happy endings aren't guaranteed, and we're often left with a sense of
melancholy. Some of the stories are even a bit macabre. But over a century later,
the well-plotted, legally-accurate yarns still satisfy one's desire for solid
resolutions to seemingly insoluble mysteries.

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.