S.S. Van Dine (Willard Huntington Wright)
Old New York: 'Historical' Mystery Novels
"'Pon my word, it's as if you chaps were all under the spell of shillin' shockers. Won't you ever learn that crimes can't be solved by deductions based merely on material clues and circumst'ntial evidence?"
"Would you advocate ignoring all the tangible evidence of a crime?" asked Markham, a bit patronizingly.
"Most emphatically."...
"I'm afraid...that we'd convict very few criminals if we were to ignore all indicatory evidence, cogent circumstances, and irresistible inferences. As a rule, you know, crimes are not witnessed by outsiders."
"That's your fundamental error, don't y' know... Every crime is witnessed by outsiders, just as is every work of art. The fact that that no one sees the criminal, or the artist, actu'lly at work, is wholly incons'quential." -- Philo Vance (Benson Murder Case)
With this pretentious claptrap, Philo Vance burst into the American mystery scene in 1926. S. S. Van Dine (W. H. Wright) (1888-1939) was an art critic and a fascistic snob, whose detective, according to Ogden Nash, 'deserves a kick in the pance'. However, he was a very intelligent and cultured man, no way as stupid as his characters were. He compiled a classic anthology of detective stories under his real name. The 'dotty logic' of the plots and the hero's immense erudition about any subject conveniently relevant to the plot of any particular book (Impressionists, Egyptian antiquities, Scotch, er Scottish, terriers, tropical fish, etc.), according to Julian Symons, does not detract from his ranking in the Golden Age. Absurd as these books are, they are very readable as 'historical novels' in the sense that they reflect a milieu that has totally vanished, if it ever existed at all, in New York City. In that sense, they are as good as old Batman comic books and Doc Savage potboilers and a lot of fun if you don't mind slogging through elaborate footnotes about Vance's cephalic indices and the like -- in fact, on rereading, I find these irrelevant footnotes and textual asides* a prime virtue in that they add a specious verisimilitude to arrant nonsense in the scenarios and the interplay with the official law-enforcement bodies. The greatest attraction lies in the characterization of an old and imaginary Gotham City.
In spite of the pomposity of the diction and style, these books, at least the earlier ones, are very well written, with some amusing dialogue (especially between Vance and D.A. Markham): "You simply couldn't imagine Beethoven being called Shorty, or Bismarck being referred to as Snookums" (P.V.: Canary Murder Case). The narrator is the invisible S.S. Van Dine himself, who is present in every scene but never says a word, making him almost a perfect Watson because he is just dumb, period. That, and the tolerance of the Law in putting up with Vance -- not to mention their incompetence -- helps turn these novels into fantasies, but the plots in the earlier books are often very good, especially the ones set during the four-year period of Markham's incumbency as New York District Attorney in some imaginary near past of the early 1920s (see page note at bottom).
Sociologically, it is interesting that EVERYBODY smokes -- cigarettes, cigars, pipes -- wherever they happen to be, even at crime scenes while fingerprinting and other forensic work is going on, and drinks their Napoleon brandies and Scotch highballs at the very height of Prohibition. Anybody who doesn't is regarded as eccentric and therefore a potential suspect. All men wore hats and most had mustaches (never beards). All women, except floozies, had bobbed haircuts. I think, also, that Van Dine invented the stereotypical jaunty, sarcastic medical examiner (Doc Doremus in this series) who always complains about missing his lunch, golf, whatever, like Max in the Inspector Morse books, and will never commit to a definite time of death. The dumb cop (Sgt Heath), who just wants to arrest everybody and work them over with a rubber hose, however, dates back to Inspector Lestrade, but in an American way -- English cops were more polite, but just as stupid, in these Golden Age days.
* It should be pointed out that, irrelevant as lots of this stuff is, it is generally correct factually, at least for its time. The author does make some blunders, such as referring to the Piltdown Man as a scientific fact, but this actually improves the atmosphere. If SS V-D says so, you can take it as gospel just as you'd accept an obscure literary quotation from Innes or Crispin. It does get rather silly when the author gives a footnote attribution to 'there is a season', from the Bible, something most people know, when it is preceded by this (untranslated, unattributed): Was eber ist deine Pflicht? ... Der Forderung des Tages. But Van Dine was a Germanophile and always includes huge chunks of German prose, as well as Latin, French, and Greek, without, usually, going to the trouble of translating them for us ignorati. Luckily, he died before WW II, otherwise he might have been interned as a crypto-Nazi. His political opinions were certainly elitist and class-conscious, though not much more so than the typical detective-story author of his times (omitting people like Hammett, who were Communists).
Book list:
- *The Benson Murder Case (1926) -- A straightforward shooting without some of the absurd trappings of later books. However, Vance's 'proof' of the height of the killer (5 feet 10 inches), diagram and all, is ridiculous and has a major geometric flaw (if the murderer had stood a foot back or forward from the position where the gun was supposedly fired -- "3 to 5 feet" according to the ballistics expert -- Vance's 'proof' predicates exactly 3 feet 6 inches for that hypotenuse equation) and the bullet could easily have deflected in its passage through the victim's skull and not continued in a straight line as measured by Philo's string. Even Van Dine realized the stupidity of this eventually and purposely denigrated that evidence when it came to the trial. Vance was right, of course, but it's absurd that on the basis of this deduction he said "No woman could possibly have committed this crime." There is some nice contrivance of alternate possible solutions. On the whole, a good job, once you get used to PV's mannerisms. Note that the exalted New York District Attorney travels around by subway rather than limousine when out investigating with Vance and Van! (And the DA's salary was $15000.) The murderer has the gall to call Philo Vance 'you sissy' when he's caught -- tsk, tsk, but good for him! (But PV proves his manhood by doing a judo move on him.)
- The Canary Murder Case (1927) -- Murder of a night-club vixen, and ostensibly an 'impossible crime'. One glaring fault is the non-discovery of a vital clue never revealed until the end; even NYC cops of the 1920s weren't that incompetent. The whole thing falls apart on that basis. Also, all of the suspects, as it turns out eventually, just happened to be in the vicinity at the appropriate time for different reasons. Vance proves his case, in lieu of his distrust of physical evidence, by arranging a poker game with the suspects, so he can select the culprit by 'psychological' indications ("Nine-tenths of poker is psychology; and if one understands the game, one can learn more of a man's inner nature at a poker table in an hour than during a year's casual association with him." This is bullshit, considering that at least three-quarters of the game consists in the luck of the draw; however, this makes for good silly drama since it reveals the murderer by his bluffing a zilch hand against Vance's four aces in a stacked deal arranged by our hero).
- The Greene Murder Case (1927/8) -- A good author does not have a character just say that the atmosphere is diabolical and a fiendish situation abides, without describing or showing it -- and expect the reader to buy it. Nor does he kill off every possible suspect except for one or two so that the murderer is revealed by elimination. This was one of the highest rated Philo Vance books in the past, and now one of the least satisfying. And the premise of murder by the book is a nice gimmick but nonsensical (and when you read the actual attributions not that truly relevant).
PV stays up all night trying to rationalize this case, when there are only two possible suspects left, one of them out of the picture by being in Atlantic City! This might have been a good story if the author had included a larger range of suspects in the household and not made it impossible for any outsiders to be involved. The only other possible suspect would be the butler, and Van Dine knew he couldn't get away with that. (Logically, however, even by Vance's screwy reasoning, the butler COULD have done it, and by the parameters is most ABLE to have done it, and should have been written up as more of a suspect motivewise -- also the other servants -- except Van Dine's murderers were never of the lower class.) This is really a poorly-done detective story, except, again, as I should stress, the olde New Yorke background, and in this case the car drive up beyond Yonkers before that area became commuter-land, reservoirs, and parkways (before even the GW bridge and the Hudson Parkway were built, and the only road exits for cars from Manhattan were the East River bridges down by Brooklyn, maybe a couple of drawbridges over the Harlem River to the Bronx, and perhaps the new Holland Tunnel to New Jersey -- otherwise you had to use car ferries). By the way, what is a tonneau in a car, which is what passengers ride in in Philo Vance novels; is that the same as a rumble seat or is it more like the separate passenger compartment in an old London taxicab?
- *The Bishop Murder Case (1928) -- My all-time favorite (and my original hardcover still has all the elaborate fold-out maps and plans). This is the one where somebody is killing off the top intellectuals of New York based on nursery-rhyme Mother Goose themes. Absolutely 'dotty' plot (as Symons put it). And it has classic Philo Vance moments -- this, if any, is the only Van Dine novel worth preserving. There is some nice digressive discussion about physics and astronomy; Van Dine apparently knew these subjects, not just swotting up on them for the book, and he realized the implications of quantum mechanics before even the theory of quarks and other micro-particles came up. This belongs in every collector's library of 'seminal' mystery novels, in spite of Vance's appearing as a chess maven (though he was described in Benson as hating chess and preferring poker) -- Van Dine always made Vance an expert in whatever the background subject of a particular book was.
- The Scarab Murder Case (1930) -- Apparently a deadly booby trap using a statue of the goddess Sakhmet. Good fun. Lots of phony Egyptology here (about the true dating of the 18th Dynasty and the effects of the Hyksos invasions), including the nonsense of ancient curses such as the King Tut business. Vance, of course, is revealed in this book as knowing how to read Egyptian hieroglyphics among all his other accomplishments ("I'm a little rusty as to the syntax but I can do a rough translation"). In the early part of the 20th Century, all this Egyptian faddism about pyramids, celestial alignments, mummies' curses, etc. was very prevalent (got revived with a different slant in the 1990s with all that Afro-American bull about 'black' culture -- yes, they were African, no, they weren't black). But this is basically just an over-expanded short story since very little of it 'grabs' even with the references to the revenge of Anûbis and other claptrap of that sort.
- *The Dragon Murder Case (1933) -- Nice atmosphere, taking place in the area where the Metropolitan Museum's Cloisters now stands. This was Injun territory way back (now Puerto Rican and Dominican, and the locale of some recently famous drug shootouts that got Rev. Sharpton all outraged about police brutality); it was obviously different in this 'Golden Age', and more countrified -- not really part of the city at all. Upper tip of Manhattan where the aborigines lived (and have left archeological remains even up to now though they are painted over with graffiti), before they sold the island to the Dutch for 24 bucks worth of beads. Apart from the background, the story is absolutely ridiculous, the dragon being somebody wearing lead boots and a diving helmet of the pre-scuba sort. If you don't catch on to that right away, you are terminally stupid. I do like the setting, though. This became the first (? not quite sure) Philo Vance movie, and that changed the author's stripes henceforward. Vance's newly revealed expertise in this book is along the lines of 'by the way, he was an expert on keeping and breeding tropical fish' ("I am myself partial to brackish water for the Scatophagus" [shit-eater?]). His voluminous personal library also happens to contain several tomes about the Lenape ('Algonkian' not '-quin' please) Indians and their legends about the piasa and the amongemokdom, or fish-dragon. This (maybe even earlier) is where one has to draw the line about the plausibility of PV's polymathy or whatever it is to be called -- probably baseball, varieties of beer, and jazz musicians are the only subjects he doesn't show himself as an expert in, and then only because the author never had occasion to use those subjects.
- The Kennel Murder Case (1933) -- "Vance for years had been a breeder of Scottish terriers. His kennels were in New Jersey...." Oh? First time we ever heard of this. But of course he never would have deigned to keep any pets in his penthouse digs on E 28th St. and commanded his butler Currie to take them out for walkies. (Well, he could have used Van Dine for that, but didn't. -- Actually, PV does aquire a house dog at the end of this.) This book reaches a height of pretentious twaddle about dog breeding, Chinese porcelains, etc. However, one still gets the impression that Wright knows what he is talking about. This is a locked-room mystery with a simple gimmick but an interesting plot illustrating the random cussedness of things.
[I knew 'Fern', elderly Executive Secretary of the American Kennel Club. She was a drunkard, could get a nasty tongue at some point in the evening, but was actually a very nice lady, a pillar of St Thomas's Episcopal Church, and I must say she hardly ever talked about dogs. We'd yack about the degeneration of modern church music and the lack of financial support for quality traditional boys' choirs. Politics was a no-no, because that would set off the very unladylike nastiness. Any public official perceived as being anti-dog or anti-pet-owner in any way was Satan incarnate; pooper-scoop laws were Chinese Communist ("Those fucking Chinks EAT dogs, you know"). She would have fit in back in the Philo Vance days, so I'm glad to say that there is still an occasional survival of that era in NY. He would never have used that language in his books, but only because one didn't print that sort of thing back then. When Vance, in another book, cries "God help us if we're too late", Van Dine in a footnote says that was the first and only time he ever heard him use a 'Scriptural expletive'! -- GS]
- The Casino Murder Case (1934) -- Like most of these novels, it opens up saying "this was the subtlest, most diabolical criminal problem of his career / orgy of horror / most astounding / most bizarre, incomprehensible, and terrifying / most perplexing, mystifying, inexplicable (indeed)" -- and of course famous in all the media the world over, kept everybody glued to their latest newspaper (not to their TV sets then like the OJ case, because they didn't have that). If it weren't for Vance the case would have remained unsolved forever, blah blah. This has become so routine it is like a Ray Kerrison editorial in the New York Post saying the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision allowing abortion is the worst and most abominable crime ever committed in the history of humanity. Ho hum. Unusual for Van Dine, this is a case of murder by poisoning, and not badly done, although the red herring of the 'heavy water' is eyewash. There is a melodramatic confrontation with the murderer at the end.
- The Kidnap Murder Case (1936) -- no idea, never reprinted that I know.
- The Garden Murder Case (1938) -- no idea, have never seen it anywhere.
- The Gracie Allen Murder Case (1938) -- Perpetrated by Hollywood fiat. If Van Dine had a sense of humor (which he sometimes showed*), it was not compatible with Gracie's.
No way. (But I don't possess this book to reread and reassess.) Note that this is the ONLY book that doesn't have a six-letter word before 'Murder Case' -- does that mean something?
* For example, the Menander Fragments Vance spends his life translating while he is not detecting. Sounds like something important like the Egyptian Book of the Dead, but is actually a Greek comedic playwright of the 3d C BC who specialized in romantic intrigues. This is more in the line of Wright's subtle put-down humor than anything as slapstick as Gracie Allen would have done. But it does show that Wright intended Vance to be a satiric character in a mild way, hence preserving the author's credentials as a serious art critic just writing detective stories as a hobby.
- The Winter Murder Case (1939, posth.) -- This was left unfinished at the author's death -- i.e., first draft plotted and limned but not embellished with learned footnotes and digressions. Can't say much about it having only read it once, 30 years ago, in a library edition. It might have been OK, then again it might not have! Nothing memorable.
- Miscellaneous: Van Dine compiled (as W.H. Wright) a nice anthology in 1927 called The Great Detective Stories. There are only 17 of them, but well selected for its time (which of course predates the best of the Christies, Carrs, etc. of the 1930s Golden Age). The introduction, providing a nice history of the detective story up to that time, is very well done, although it stresses ratiocination before atmosphere and character and advocates a very dry and logical approach to the practice of this genre in its 'pure' form. One should not be surprised that most of the authors he praises most are pretty much forgotten these days (J.S. Fletcher, Eden Phillpotts, A.E.W. Mason et al).
Here is a list of his favorite recent novels: Trent's Last Case (Bentley), The House of the Arrow (Mason), The Cask (Crofts), Who Killed Cock Robin? (Hext), The Red Redmaynes (Phillpotts), The Eye of Osiris (Freeman), The Viaduct Murders (Knox), The Footprints That Stopped (Fielding), The Red House Mystery (Milne), and the short stories about Reginald Fortune (Bailey) and Father Brown (Chesterton).
In Progress -- This page will possibly never be fully completed, because the books got worse and worse the more popular the author became and the more Hollywood influences took over his output, also harder and harder to find since Scribner gave up the ghost in its republishing effort. Quite a few of the later ones have never been reprinted or read by this reviewer (or read only once a long time ago then promptly forgotten).
If you have any comments please address them to Grobius
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