The “Canary” Murder Case was the second of Philo Vance’s 12 interventions into the murder investigations of New York City district attorney John F. X. Markham. Vance is a young aesthete with “a liberal independent income” that enables him to employ a butler (Currie) and an attorney-biographer (S. S. Van Dine), and a European education that has trained him to drop his “g’s” (“It is a bit mystifyin’,” 64) and to invoke his aunt (“Oh, my aunt! Oh my precious aunt,” 198). Markham is Vance’s closest friend, and while he does not share Vance’s Nietzschean disdain for the herd, Markham is tolerant of his friend’s flippancies, and when he encounters an unusually mystifying homicide, he wisely submits himself and the police force of New York City to the instruction of imperious Vance.
Vance approaches the elucidation of murder with little reverence for the physical traces—cigarette ashes, footprints, torn bits of manuscript—that revealed so much to Sherlock Holmes and his epigones. In chapter 2 of The “Canary” Murder Case, he discourses on the futility of pursuing such leads. Rather, he proposes an aesthetic-psychological approach that studies the manner of the criminal rather as an art historian studies the manner of a painter. Once he fully comprehends the style of the crime, the investigator will infallibly be able to profile the criminal.
As it happens, chapter 3 confronts Markham with a crime that proves the impotence of the analysis of physical evidence. Margaret Odell is the dead canary: she is a Follies dancer who translated her notoriety in the bohemian demi-monde into a series of remunerative relationships with five men: Charles (Pop) Cleaver, a gambler with political connections; Kenneth Spotswoode, a wealthy blueblood; Louis Mannix, a fur importer; Ambroise Lindquist, a physician-therapist for high society; and Tony Skeel, a professional burglar.
Odell is discovered strangled in her disordered apartment on Manhattan’s West Side. She had entertained Spotswoode until 11:30 p.m. As Spotswoode passed the building’s telephone station on his way out, both he and the night operator, William Jessup, heard Margaret Odell cry out; they rushed back to her door to hear her say everything was all right. Spotswoode then departed, and the watchful eye of Jessup and the fact that the door of a side corridor was bolted on the inside make it apparently impossible for anyone else to have entered or exited the apartment. Van Dine, who narrates the case, provides floor plans of the building and of the apartment to verify this.
Piqued by the situation, Vance commits himself to the investigation: “Really, y’ know, I’m no avenger of society, but I do detest an unsolved problem” (128).
Cleaver, Mannix, Lindquist, and Skeel all have alibis for the time of the murder, but Vance is able to discredit all of them. Suspicion fastens upon Skeel, whose fingerprints place him inside the door of the Canary’s clothes closet, but Vance insists that his is not the mind that designed the crime, though he does demonstrate that Skeel could have used a pair of tweezers and a bit of thread to throw the inside bolt of the side door from outside the building, thus enabling him to escape unseen after the murder.
Skeel makes an appointment to speak to the district attorney but is killed before he can talk. Cleaver, Mannix, and Spotswoode have no alibi for the time of this second murder either. (Dr. Lindquist, having been confined to a sanatorium, is eliminated as a suspect.)
Vance asks the docile Markham to call the three remaining suspects to Markham’s apartment for an informal inquiry and a few hands of poker. Van Dine provides a diagram of the seating at the poker table. By observing how Cleaver and Mannix respond to prearranged hands of poker, and by how Mannix responds to a challenge of cutting cards, Vance determines that Spotswoode is the murderer.
He then leads Markham back to Margaret Odell’s apartment, where he discovers that Spotswoode used a phonograph record of himself (“in falsetto”) crying out and then saying everything was all right.
Confronted by Markham, Spotswoode confesses: Margaret Odell had blackmailed her other lovers for money; she was asking Spotswoode to divorce his wife and marry her. He requests a moment to write a note to his wife, and Vance, knowing Spotswoode’s intention, urges Markham to acquiesce. To Markham’s dismay and Vance’s satisfaction, Spotswoode commits suicide.
It is difficult for many 21st-century readers to understand how the Philo Vance stories could ever have been so popular in the 1920s. Indeed, the difficulty was already emerging in the late 1930s. Vance appears to be an insufferable prig, and Markham a very lax officer of the law, condoning all sorts of improprieties, as Vance absconds with evidence from the crime scene and arbitrarily cuts off lines of questioning from the district attorney and Sergeant Heath of the homicide squad.
Van Dine’s plotting does not approach the cleverness of that of Agatha Christie or Ellery Queen or John Dickson Carr. The phonograph trick, though not original, is neatly used, but having Margaret Odell’s ex-boyfriend choose to burgle her apartment on the same night her current boyfriend chooses to execute a well-planned murder scheme stretches credibility. And the characterization is sketchy: the men and women are all thinly defined types.
Detective fiction, even very good detective fiction, frequently works with types, but Vance’s profession that psychological analysis is a universal solvent for crime only emphasizes how little the reader learns of the inner lives of Skeel, Cleaver, Mannix, Lindquist, or Spotswoode . . . or of Van Dine, Markham, or even Vance himself. The victim, Margaret Odell, remains a cipher.
But the Philo Vance novels were enormously popular. The first, The Benson Murder Case (1926), sold well enough for Van Dine’s publisher, Scribner, to develop a major advertising campaign for the second. The “Canary” Murder Case was serialized in the publisher’s house magazine, an unprecedented distinction. Philo Vance joined Mah Jongg, crossword puzzles, and King Tut in the fads of 1927, and through the early years of the Great Depression, he kept his author’s brandy snifter full and his publisher solvent.
And while Philo Vance might, as Ogden Nash famously observed, need a kick in the pants, his affectations and his hothouse enthusiasms for French phrases, Japanese prints, Egyptian jewelry, and Cézanne paintings certainly made him memorable. This was the deliberate plan of Willard Huntington Wright, the avant-garde editor, novelist, and art critic who wore the mask of S. S. Van Dine.
Wright’s editor at Scribner, Max Perkins, explained: “He said the point was not whether people liked Vance but to make him distinctive, so that they could not forget him” (214).
Wright presented Philo Vance as a sort of cartoon Übermensch whose judgments on all matters—on art and on society as well as on guilt and innocence—are infallible, and he set him in the racy milieu of 1920s New York City. Both the character and the scene were something new in detective fiction, and S. S. Van Dine earned his reputation as a significant innovator in the genre.
Sources
Loughery, John. Alias S. S. Van Dine. New York: Scribner, 1992.
Perkins, Maxwell. Editor to Author. New York: Scribner, 1979.
Tuska, Jon. Philo Vance: The Life and Times of S. S. Van Dine. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1971.
Van Dine, S. S. The “Canary” Murder Case. New York: Scribner, 1927.
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