25 APRIL 1981, Page 16

Ladies of detection

Sir: Surely your reviewer (Hugh Massingberd, 11 April) is mistaken in calling Anna Katharine Green 'the first woman to write detective fiction.' The Leavenworth Case (though I am not certain that this was her first detective story) was published in 1878, just beating Lawrence L. Lynch (Mrs Van Deventer) who published Shadowed By Three in 1879 (was this her first?). But Miss Braddon was writing stories of detection right back in the early 1860s and Mrs Henry Wood's Within the Maze appeared in 1872.

Graham Greene Antibes