I found out about this book from a post linked on Lithub, and I was interesting by the ways the author portrayed this detective series I’d never heard of:
How a Drug-Addicted Art Critic Created the Perfect Sleuth for the Jazz Age
So I checked my local library and they had this copy in the stacks. My library has been around for a 100 years or more, and while they don’t have that many branches and it’s all a little 1970s inside them, the main downtown building is great and has a wonderful collection in the bowels. This copy was a first edition printing from 1926, and had those wonderful old browning pages.
The book itself was interesting as a literary object, but the novel was not super interesting. In a lot of ways, Philo Vance and SS Van Dine are a kind of American Lord Peter Wimsey. The writing is more or less good, but at least in this first one the mystery itself was both kind of banal, and the “brilliance” of the detective was deeply suspect.
So the set up is that SS Van Dine is a lawyer who is friends with Philo Vance from their schools days: Van Dine was in law school and Vance was younger, but clearly brilliant, and also quite dilletantish. And so the result is the one plying his honest trade, while the other fops around doing this or that. They happen to be together when it comes to pass that one of Vance’s friends is murdered, and he tags along to help solve the mystery or at least from a sense of curiosity. It turns out he’s quite valuable and his erudite education, his Latin and literature, and his reason, provide the necessary push to solve the murder. It’s a shame that so many of his “brilliances” are lucky assumptions that sound like complete bullshit, but happen to work out.
He really is a LOT like Lord Peter Wimsey, but there’s not Harriet Vane to balance him out.
(Photo: https://www.goodbooksinthewoods.com/pages/books/920/s-s-van-dine/the-benson-murder-case)
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