The Novels | Plot Construction | Characterization | Van Dine's Biography | Van Dine and the Future
A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection Home Page
The Benson Murder Case (1926)
The "Canary" Murder Case (1927)
The Greene Murder Case (1928)
The Scarab Murder Case (1929)
The Kidnap Murder Case (1936)
The Gracie Allen Murder Case (1938)
The Winter Murder Case (1939)
Van Dine's first three mystery novels are an important achievement in the history of mystery fiction. Van Dine planned and plotted his first three novels as a trilogy. All three were plotted out and written in short form, more or less at the same time. After they were accepted as a group by famed editor Maxwell Perkins, Van Dine expanded them into full length novels.
The Benson Murder Case (1926) introduces Van Dine's sleuth, Philo Vance. Vance is a wealthy connoisseur of the arts, and amateur detective who assists the district attorney with his investigations. Van Dine's whole first chapter is devoted not the mystery, but a description of Vance's art collection. Van Dine was an art critic by profession, and Vance comes across as a genuine intellectual with a deep knowledge of the world of art. The Benson Murder Case is somewhat dry and austere as a plot. It is a straightforward murder and its solution is without the symbolic resonances of the next two books. Instead its focus is on the mind and personality of Philo Vance. The book is written in Van Dine's magnificent English prose style, a style out of sync with the plain vernacular popularized in the 1920's by Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis and others. Instead Van Dine's style suggests the ornate prose masterpieces of Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Thomas Browne and Charlotte Brontë. Van Dine's portrait of a reasoning mind in his depiction of Philo Vance's solving the mystery is genuinely impressive, and combined with Vance's rich verbal fluency forms a believable portrait of human Intellect at work.
Van Dine's next book was The "Canary" Murder Case (1927), which deals with the murders of a sexy nightclub singer known as the Canary, and eventually, that of her boyfriend. Van Dine's subject here is sexual love, symbolized by the Canary and her boyfriend, and its destruction at the hands of American Puritanism. The Canary's relationship, and love nest living quarters, are described with Van Dine's remarkable skillful prose, and form an ideal archetype of romantic, sexual love. Vance is able to identify the Canary's killer, but unable of course to bring her or her boyfriend back to life. The killer is motivated by the Puritanism that has had such a chilling effect on American life.
The "Canary" Murder Case contains beautiful descriptions of the Canary's luxurious surroundings; it also emphasizes the romantic physical appeal of both the Canary and her boyfriend. It is the most sensual novel ever to appear as a Golden Age mystery story, in the full meaning of that term. The novel is a powerful, romantic portrait of both the beauty of physical love, and its snuffing out in the icy American climate of romantic repression. This is the book that made Van Dine famous, becoming an immense best seller; it also started a popular series of films, with William Powell as Vance.
The Greene Murder Case (1928) focuses on a related subject, the murder one by one of the Greene family: "The holocaust that consumed the Greene family", as Van Dine memorably puts it. This book contains Van Dine's greatest ingenuity as a puzzle plot constructor, containing a number of clever ideas. It also completes a trilogy. Benson focused on the death of a single man, who lead a public life and was involved in business; "Canary" on a couple and romantic love; and Greene on a family. The three books together have a powerful cumulative impact, their imagery bringing a tragic focus to basic human institutions.
The next book, The Bishop Murder Case (1928), is admired by everyone but me. Many people cite it as Van Dine's best book, but it just seems labored and pointless to me. It does seem to be the first mystery book built around a nursery rhyme. Many Golden Age novels are constructed around some formal scheme: Ellery Queen and Ngaio Marsh come to mind here. Marsh's chapter headings especially convey a fascinating sense of pure geometry. Even Agatha Christie used this approach in Ten Little Indians. Bishop seems to be not only the first nursery-rhyme mystery book, but the first of any sort of mystery novel constructed around a formal scheme. On the negative side, Vance playing the role of judge, jury and executioner at the end is wrong - an attack on democratic institutions and the rule of law. And Van Dine's comments on science are not as informed or as original as his comments elsewhere on art.
The Scarab Murder Case (1929) succeeds best as an example of Van Dine's storytelling skill. An elaborate murder investigation takes place in a museum of Egyptology, and its many details and complex unrolling plot hold the reader's interest. There is also a great deal of well done material on ancient Egyptian art. The solution is both a bit obvious, and very implausible. Even here, however, Van Dine pleases with his numerous, carefully thought through details. So while not a classic of the puzzle plot, it is an atmospheric and fun to read book. Parts of the solution remind one of Ellery Queen's The Dutch Shoe Mystery (1931), and it stands as part of the cultural background of that book. It also reminds one somewhat of Queen's later successor to Dutch Shoe, The Chinese Orange Mystery (1934). The in-depth murder investigation is also directly ancestral to the even more complex sleuthing at the crime scene in Queen's books.
Van Dine's middle period books show some decline. The Kennel Murder Case (1932) has a terrific first half (Chapters 1 - 10), with Vance investigating a complex, coincidence laden, locked room murder. After this the book runs out of steam, and seems padded. According to the 1936 introduction to the novel, in the omnibus Philo Vance Murder Cases, the two halves were written nearly a year apart. Several real life friends of Van Dine appear as themselves in the second half of the novel. The Dragon Murder Case (1933) has a memorable impossible crime in its opening pages, but its solution is fairly ordinary, and the book's storytelling is none too good. The Casino Murder Case (1934) works better as storytelling, but its mystery plot is also undistinguished.
Van Dine's last three novels show his storytelling talent operating at full force. The Kidnap Murder Case (1936) adds more physical action than the usual Van Dine cerebral plotting allows, perhaps as an attempt to keep up with popular styles. The action scenes at the end, while apparently simple and restrained compared to the orgies of violence in some pulp tales, seem remarkably dramatic. This book also has a very well constructed mystery plot.
Van Dine's last two books were intended as Hollywood scenarios. Both are shorter than Van Dine's typical novels, and The Winter Murder Case (1939) is in fact a novella that Van Dine intended to expand into a full length book, a project cut short by his death. The Winter Murder Case seems especially similar to the B mystery movies of the thirties, and seems like a cross between Van Dine's usual style, and those films. It was intended as a vehicle for Sonja Henie, and while reading the story it is easy to "see" her in that role.
The Gracie Allen Murder Case (1938) is in many ways an experimental novel. It includes not just Hollywood stars in its plot, George Burns and Gracie Allen, but also such characters as Gracie's mother and brother. This gives the book an unusual feel. So does the comic tone of much of Gracie's dialogue. This tone suddenly shifts in a later chapter to one character's philosophically anguished speculations, and then back again to Gracie. The whole thing works oddly wonderfully, and shows Van Dine's skill at combining his traditional approach with some unusual forms.
Van Dine's special skill was the construction of interesting, complex, book length plots. He was not anywhere as good at ingenious puzzle ideas of the sort Chesterton, Christie, and Carr excelled at. But his books and their solid construction fascinate. Detail after detail gets piled up into an interesting pattern. This can be better described as "Good storytelling" or "Good construction" than as "clever mystery ideas", perhaps. Van Dine's are novels in which the unfolding plot in all its details is more interesting than the solution. This is not to say the plot is necessarily ultra-complicated. Van Dine's plots are more well-proportioned than huge; some of his followers expanded their range, especially Queen and Abbott. Reading Van Dine's books is an experience in beauty. The well designed stories meet the beautiful literary style.
Most of the Van Dineans followed their leader in the sense that the whole of the plot is more interesting than the sum of the parts. There is a "Gestalt" effect in their books. This reaches its peak, of course with Ellery Queen, and his complex chains of reasonings. But it can also be seen in works as different as Abbott's Geraldine Foster, and Marsh's False Scent. The Van Dineans tended to lean toward novels and novellas, not short stories: only Ellery Queen and Stuart Palmer wrote any quantity of short fiction. This is a logical consequence of needing a large canvas on which all the details of plot can be painted.
The Locked Room problems in The "Canary" Murder Case and The Kennel Murder Case are less central to their puzzle plots than we are used to in John Dickson Carr. In Carr's novels, the impossible crime is very complex, and the major riddle of the mystery. The same is true in Chesterton, Carr's beloved master. Van Dine's locked rooms are simpler, and more mechanical in their solution, than Carr's or Chesterton's. Van Dine usually treats them as just one more ingredient he has thrown into the stew of his plots; he solves the one in Kennel two thirds of the way through the book, treating it as just another plot twist. Kennel cites as its ancestor, not Chesterton, but the locked room novels of Edgar Wallace, such as The Clue of the New Pin (1923), and The Clue of the Twisted Candle.
The best part of the film version of The Kennel Murder Case is the final 15 minutes, during which Philo Vance reconstructs the murders. He uses a scale model of the house, and this is intercut with shots flashing back on the commission of the crime. Many of these contain camera movements, and are filmed from the point of view of participants in the action.
The Benson Murder Case shows Van Dine's ability to involve a series of suspects in the mystery, and make them look guilty or suspicious in turn. Van Dine school member Stuart Palmer would later make a specialty of creating suspects who were Mysteriously Involved in the case.
Some commentators has claimed that Van Dine's books are not "fair play": that is, that they do not contain clues that would allow the reader to figure out the solution. Van Dine sometimes has problems with fair play, but such criticisms are exaggerated. The ballistics scene early on (Chapter 9) in The Benson Murder Case is not fair play. The reader can only watch, while Philo Vance makes deductions from evidence the reader has not seen before. But the solution to the novel is indeed fair play: there is a strong clue, indicating the guilty party.
The Benson Murder Case is full of characterization, right at the start of Van Dine's career. Over a dozen policemen, and all the suspects, are given detailed character portraits. The characterizations can be said to be external rather than internal. Van Dine never lets us see any of the characters' thoughts directly. Instead, the book concentrates on what the characters seem like from the outside, and how they impress other people. We learn about their attitudes, the emotions they express, how they carry themselves, what sort of things they say. There are detailed descriptions of how they dress and groom themselves. Many of the portraits involve Van Dine's gift for poetic description. Both these descriptions, and the ornately phrased dialogue that also builds characterization, depend on Van Dine's skills as a prose stylist.
The "Canary" Murder Case extends this technique. We get vivid, richly detailed portraits of the "Canary" (a night club singer), her boyfriend, her maid, and the killer.
Van Dine's characters are also character types. Markham is the archetypal honest, implacable District Attorney. The Canary and her boyfriend are the archetypes of young lovers. The various police investigators form a series of pocket portraits of the sorts of men found on the police squads of the day.
Van Dine's lengthy introduction and notes to his anthology The World's Great Detective Stories (1928) constitute the pioneering history of detective fiction. Written in Van Dine's most magnificent prose, this history is still the core around which all others have been constructed (including the present writer's). My copy has been a treasured possession since I bought it at a used book sale as a child.
Van Dine wrote a series of short stories for Warner Brothers film studio in the early 1930's. These stories were used as the basis for a series of 12 short films, each around 20 minutes long, that were released in 1930 - 1931. The Skull Murder Mystery (1931) shows Van Dine's vigorous plot construction. It is also notable for its non-racist treatment of Chinese characters, something quite unusual in its day. Van Dine was one of the first mystery writers to include non-stereotyped portraits of racial minorities in his work. Please see the article on Minorities and Civil Rights in Mystery Fiction for a discussion.
As far as I know, none of Van Dine's screen treatments have been published in book form. I do not even know if the manuscripts survive today. Short films used to be extremely popular. Hollywood made hundreds of them during the studio era. Except for a handful of comedy silents, most of these films are forgotten today, and not even listed in film reference books.
John Loughery's biography, Alias S.S. Van Dine (1992), is full of fascinating detail about the author. Loughery shows how Van Dine's early career as a cultural figure (1910-1919) was taken up by two causes. One was literary Naturalism. Van Dine wrote a novel and some short stories in this mode, as well as publishing such fiction by others as editor of the magazine "The Smart Set".
Secondly, Van Dine's brother, painter Stanton MacDonald-Wright, was a founder of the Synchromism movement in painting. Van Dine wrote three books promoting Synchromist ideas. He also had ties to the American abstract artists of the Stieglitz circle. So Van Dine was at the center of the entire American modernist movement in art, with a special knowledge about, and enthusiasm for, abstract art. Loughery is an art historian, and his background here is most sophisticated.
In 1920 Van Dine largely gave up cultural journalism, perhaps regarding it as a lost cause, and permanently turned to popular culture, instead. During 1920-1923, he tried and failed to make it in the movie business, but he could never really get his foot in the door. (Later both Ellery Queen and Anthony Boucher would make similar failed attempts). He was interested in projects that could combine abstract art with set design for films. He did produce a book, The Future of Painting (1923), which predicted an art of pure color delivered through technical means. One thinks of the light organs of his era, the 1920's German experiments in abstract color film (Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger, Walter Ruttmann) which began in 1921, the light films of Jim Davis, the Vortex light shows of Jordan Belson, and the 1950's and beyond abstract films of Belson and the Whitney Brothers, the hand-painted films of Stan Brakhage, all of which I love. Increasingly, such films are available on DVD.
In 1924 Loughery records Van Dine's first plans to produce a "popular novel". Throughout 1925 he outlined his detective trilogy. Van Dine was basically a writer. Although he was an important critic of abstract art, Van Dine was a novelist, not a painter. Van Dine eventually "found himself" as an author of detective fiction, and was far more prolific in that role than any other, publishing twelve books.
Van Dine had some blind spots. Loughery documents Van Dine's sexist disdain for women artists and writers, whether literary or detectival. Christie is slammed in Van Dine's history of detective fiction, and many other female writers are ignored.
Loughery has some blind spots of his own. He seems unaware of just how important Van Dine is in the history of detective fiction, being the founder of a new school, which includes Ellery Queen, Anthony Abbott, Rufus King, Stuart Palmer, C. Daly King and Rex Stout. Most of these writers are not even mentioned in Loughery's book!
Loughery is also needlessly condemnatory of Van Dine's including roles for specific actresses in his last two novels. This has always been a common practice in theater and film. For example, Shakespeare and Marlowe created roles in their plays that were suited to the talents of their actors. Mozart composed his operas with the strengths and limitations of his singers in mind.
All in all, however, this is a fascinating and well done book. Loughery's detailed comments on Van Dine's novels are insightful, and the mountain of information Loughery has unearthed on Van Dine's life and career make it an important reference on his life and times.
Van Dine would be thrilled with today's computer workstations, and their ability to model both form and color. In many ways, Van Dine seems to be one of the keenest prophets of the future that has now come to pass. He predicted that technology would lead to a revolution in our ability to manipulate color and light, and it has. He tried his overwhelming best to awake Americans to both modern art, and the art of the world, and now there are a flood of art books available on every subject for everyone to read. Van Dine's dream of a society where there was a mass knowledge of art is now a reality. It has replaced the mass ignorance of his day. Mass education and mass literacy in great writing has also become much more of reality than in Van Dine's time, when higher education was painfully restricted to a tiny handful of Americans. The struggle Van Dine undertook to inform Americans about the best in literature has now been won. Van Dine was one of the first American popular authors to challenge racism; we now have a society vastly more equal than in Van Dine's, although much more work needs to be done to fight against racism. Van Dine genuinely believed in civilization, and he tried to extend it to everybody.
The mystery field does not honor Van Dine enough. He tried to synthesize the best elements of mystery fiction in his work. In doing so he founded a new school, one that opened the door for some of the best detective writing in American history, by Ellery Queen and others. Nor do people appreciate Van Dine as a role model for life. Some mystery fans today are obsessed with "hard-boiledness". They seem over impressed with these stories about men running around with guns. These stories are nothing but cheap macho fantasies. Instead, it is the people like Van Dine who make a difference, people who try to build and make things. Van Dine's endless work for science and the arts is what creates everything of value in life. It is at the core of civilization. If we want to pass down a better life for our children, we have to adopt Van Dine's approach as our model for living. We must be as intellectual, creative and constructive as he was.