The Step on the Stair
1923
When Edgar Q. Bartholomew is handed a letter and key meant for someone else entirely, a simple case of mistaken identity spirals into something far darker in this 1923 masterpiece from the woman who invented the detective novel. A stranger in a hurry, a lawyer's careless mistake, and suddenly our Edgar holds secrets that belong to another man who shares his name. But there are three Edgars in this tale, and as the layers of deception peel back, the question becomes not who Edgar is, but which of the three he truly is. Anna Katharine Green, the Victorian genius behind "The Leavenworth Case," constructs her puzzles with the precision of an architect, and "The Step on the Stair" reveals family inheritances, hidden relationships, and identities so cleverly swapped that the truth seems to shift with each revelation. The courtroom floor plan in the frontispiece hints at the dramatic reckoning to come, where identities must be unmasked and love itself becomes the final prize. This is Golden Age mystery at its finest: intricate, deceptive, and utterly irresistible.
Editions
X-Ray
“Don't put it into words. Let us leave some things to be understood, not said.””
— Anna Katharine Green
“But Fate was in an impish mood that night.””
— Anna Katharine Green
“When you are that- when a woman is a guiding star to her husband- she may face the ills of life without fear, for the blessing of Heaven is upon her.””
— Anna Katharine Green
“I had feared to be presumptuous; of building up a fairyland out of dreams; of yielding to my imagination rather than to my good sense. And yet, deep down in some inner consciousness, a faint insidious hope had whispered to itself that if I showed myself worthy, perhaps-perhaps- And now perhaps had become reality, and all doubt and mistrust a vanished dream.””
— Anna Katharine Green
“Together, we had fathomed its secret. Together, we had trod its strangely concealed stairway. The sense of an unseen presence which had shaken the hearts of many in traversing its halls was no longer a mystery; but the by-ways in life which the harassed soul must tread have their own hidden glooms and their own unexpectedness; and the echoes of steps we hear but cannot see, linger long in the consciousness and do not always end with the years. Should I brave them? Dare I brave them when something deep within me protested with an insistent, inexorable disclaimer?””
— Anna Katharine Green
“Oh the hunger in his stare!””
— Anna Katharine Green
“I am glad something happened to give you what you wanted.””
— Anna Katharine Green
“I tried to divert myself by reading, and I think my love for books which presently grew into a passion had its inception in that monotonous succession of day after day without a break in the suspense which held me like a hand upon my throat.””
— Anna Katharine Green
“A woman is a victim of her own emotions.””
— Anna Katharine Green
