In the first of Willard Huntington Wright’s Philo Vance mysteries, a prominent stockbroker, Alvin Benson, is murdered in his Manhattan apartment. The district attorney, John Markham, happens to be with his friend, the art collector and dilletante Philo Vance, when he gets the call, and they go to the murder scene together. So does Vance’s sidekick and narrator of his adventures, never called anything but Van Dine or just Van.
Philo Vance has theories about solving murders that go directly against those of his friend and the police: he thinks physical evidence and circumstantial evidence merely distract investigators, that motive and confessions are of no value, and that the only useful approach to solving crime is the psychological. At this point in Vance’s exposition, I realized why I had been irritated at Van Dine’s descriptions of characters as he introduced them. He describes them in great detail and frequently uses comparisons with art works (Wright was an art critic before he realized how much money there was in popular fiction). Then he proceeds to extrapolate aspects of attitude and behavior from the physical features. Thus, he is conditioning us to accept the bushwa of Vance’s theories.
Vance believes that everything one does is a result of one’s psychological personality. In chapters six and eight, he asserts these theories in his affected manner, which is partly an aping of Britishisms, including dropping final g’s and syllables (inev’tability,” “prob’bly,” “mod’rated,”), calling people “old dear” and saying “’pon my word” and “don’t y’know” often, referring often to the world of visual art, and generally being polysyllabic, pedantic, and irritating. He also piles on quotations, in French, German, and Latin, that, along with his allusions, are often wrenched into the context without any real congruence.
It turns out that Vance is quite acute at observation of plain old facts, however, and one of the striking early moments of the book is Vance’s demonstration, using ballistics lines and angles, that the murderer has to be have been about six feet tall—therefore eliminating the woman, Muriel St. Cyr, who had dinner with Benson the night of the murder. Markham had become fixated on her as the main murder suspect and seemed about to arrest her. This pattern is repeated later, as Markham fixates on St. Cyr’s fiancée, and Vance has to restrain him from that arrest. Ultimately, Vance protracts his explication of the murder by casting doubt on each suspect’s alibi and building a circumstantial case against each of them in turn. It’s annoyin’, don’t y’know?
In Wright’s defense, he manages to keep a number of suspects in play as possibilities for the murderer until late in the book. The Benson Murder Case is on the list of “Detective Story Cornerstones” compiled by Howard Haycraft and Ellery Queen.
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