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08/01/2004: "Philo Vance - The Forgotten Sleuth"
The crime novel has developed into a many faceted beast. We now have many sub genres from the psychological crime, history mystery and police procedural to the hardboiled school and the cosies, with several other stops along the way. However, all these have evolved from the whodunit of the Golden Age of Crime, a period between the two world wars. Authors from the Golden Age such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and G. K. Chesterton are still read avidly today. However there is one author, S. S. Van Dine, who is regarded as the writer who brought the Americans into the Golden Age, and is now virtually forgotten. The same can be said of his gentleman sleuth, Philo Vance.
There are perhaps several good reasons why Philo Vance is forgotten these days. Although he appeared in twelve novels between 1926 and 1938, he was, according to H. R. F. Keating in his Bedside Companion to Crime (1989) 'the biggest prig that ever came down the pike.' It would seem that American poet and wit Ogden Nash agreed with this assessment for it was he who composed the following couplet: 'Philo Vance/Needs a kick in the pance.' Yet, Vance was the most popular fictional detective of his day. By 1930, the Vance novels were selling more than a million copies each. It is generally accepted that America entered the Golden Age of crime fiction with the publication of the first Vance novel.
Philo Vance was created by American author S.S. Van Dine, whose real name was William Huntingdon Wright. Down on his luck in the early twenties, Wright devoted himself to an exhaustive study of crime fiction, hoping that he could emulate the success of the post war British detective stories. He approached Max Perkins, the renowned editor of Scribners in New York, with a plan for a series of detective novels that would feature an American sleuth as memorable as Sherlock Holmes, a Manhattan flavour, and a style of detection that was more concerned with creating a psychological portrait of a murderer than with any mere deciphering of physical clues. The result was the Philo Vance novels.
Vance is a tall, grey-eyed, aristocratic, amateur detective who is asked to help solve murder cases by his best friend, District Attorney Markham. Sergeant Heath of the New York City Police initially dislikes Vance because of his pomposity and affectations, but later becomes his friend. In essence Heath is the dumb policeman who just wants to arrest everybody and work them over with a rubber hose. He dates back to Inspector Lestrade, but in an American way. Scotland Yarders were more polite, but just as stupid, in these Golden Age days.
Working in Prohibition era New York, Vance, with his aristocratic airs, stands out against workaday cops. His laconic, bemused and drowsy eyes, imperious demeanour, bored speech patterns and upper class louchness - for example he drops every final g, and smokes expensive Egyptian cigarettes in a holder, effects a pseudo British accent and wears a monocle - contribute to his priggishness. He is a strange mixture. He has the foppish pretensions of Wimsey, the cold detachment of Holmes and the enigmatic eloquence of Poirot. He is also a little boring! Writer and critic William Del Leandrea observed that 'Vance was the kind of person you'd cross the street to avoid.'
Like Van Dine, the author, Vance attended Harvard and several European universities, indulging his thirst for knowledge, particularly of art. His interest in psychology directed him into the field of crime detection in which he is eager to test his theories about human personalities. A disciple of Nietzsche, he is not above killing when it is obvious that the law will be unable to punish the murderer when he has been tracked down.
Vance (which Dine tells us is not he real name, a ploy used latter by Margery Allingham with her character Campion) lives in splendour in a penthouse in New York's east thirties.
The stories are told by his pet lawyer, the author S. S. Van Dine, who appears in the novels as character so devoid of interest that he never speaks one line of dialogue.
The twelve Philo Vance novels each have a similar title: The something Murder Case. The first was The Benson Murder Case (1926), in which Alvin Benson is found shot dead in his New York apartment. Vance spots the murderer almost immediately but seems to enjoy the plight of Markham and Heath as they employ circumstantial evidence to accuse five different people of the crime. This novel was based loosely on the actual 1920 murder of Joseph Elwell.
Possibly the best Vance novel is The Bishop Murder Case (1929) featuring a series of bizarre murders based on nursery rhymes. The original title was The Mother Goose Murder Case, but the editors of the periodical in which it was serialised, the American Magazine, feared that readers would think that the story was intended for a juvenile audience. In this case, the process of elimination is used again. Each suspect is murdered in turn, until only three remain. Vance switches a poisoned drink intended for him, and the deranged murderer dies.
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'. (The Canary Murder Case)
The series peaked in the early thirties; the sales of the later books were only a fraction of the first. Vance's prissy and effete ways were overtaken by the hardboiled guys such as Sam Spade who operated in grimy urban settings and certainly didn't wear monocles! Van Dine tried to adapt his style but it didn't work. When Vance did become involved in stake outs and car chases, as in The Kidnap Murder Case (1936) the result is a stilted novel obviously written to a formula which suited neither the character nor the author. Julian Symons, in his masterly survey of the genre, Bloody Murder, states that, '... the decline in the last six Vance books is so steep that the critic who called the ninth of them one more stitch in his literary shroud was not overstating the case.' Van Dine died in 1939, an angry and disappointed man, well aware that his audience had abandoned him for the rowdier style of crime fiction which he disdained.
Vance, the most loquacious of detectives, came to the screen shortly after the advent of the talkies. Over the years he has been portrayed by no less than eight actors. He was first played by the urbane moustachioed William Powell in three movies for Paramount. Interestingly a young Basil Rathbone appeared as Vance in an MGM vehicle, The Bishop Murder Case in 1930, nine years before he was to play Sherlock Holmes.
Perhaps the most unusual film featuring Van Dine's sleuth was The Gracie Allen Murder Case (1939). Van Dine's friendship with the comedienne Gracie Allen (married to George Burns) led him to tailor this mystery for her. It was the studio's idea and the author, desperate for money, readily agreed.
The Vance films made after Van Dine's death tended to present the character as just another tough private eye without any of the idiosyncratic trappings of the original character.
As one critic observed, the real mystery about Philo Vance is why he was so popular in the first place. Well, he was and he has earned his place of prominence in the Golden Age, but it is not difficult to see why today he is the forgotten sleuth.
David Stuart Davies on Monday, August 1st 2004 @ 04:01 PM GMT [link]