Philo Vance Books
New York in the 1920s is the world’s most glamorous city, and Philo Vance, an arrogant art expert, steps in to solve the puzzle of why a scheming stockbroker was murdered, not merely because he is bored and seeking new entertainment, but because honor compels him to point out the myriad ways in which the police are getting it wrong.
The Canary of the title is Margaret Odell, once a showgirl in the Ziegfeld Follies, more recently an occasional nightclub singerl. When she is murdered, there are any number of suspects, all of the male variety. The police are baffled but Philo Vance is on the scene, ready to apply his brilliance, his erudition, his astonishingly nuanced grasp of human nature to the solving of the crime.
Members of the Greene family keep dying while the pool of possible perpetrators keeps shrinking. Philo Vance―the independently wealthy, staggeringly brilliant, not remotely modest amateur sleuth―uses his detective skills to unravel the murders, though sadly not before most of the Greene family has been bumped off.
Philo Vance finds his old chum District Attorney Anthony Markham up against a bizarre series of murders inspired by children’s nursery rhymes. The first murder was apparently based on “Who Killed Cock Robin'”; it is followed by more hideous deaths referencing “Mother Goose.” Philo Vance suspects a connection to a rather more sophisticated writer.
When the chief suspect in the murder of a wealthy, but unpopular dog breeder is also found dead, Philco Vance decides to solve the perplexing case
When Sanford Montague is killed while swimming in the pool on the Stamm estate, Philo Vance investigates the murder
Philo Vance, gourmet and amateur detective in 1930s Manhattan, investigates three mysterious poisonings at a fashionable gambling club
In the ninth novels in the series, "The Garden Murder Case," Philo Vance investigates a murder and other suspicious events connected with the rooftop garden of the Garden's New York penthouse, where a group friends gather to listen to the result of horse races.
A reemergence of a long out-of-print classic, first published in 1936, follows the disappearance of playboy Kaspar Kenting and the investigations of the detective who sorts through the clues of an apparent kidnapping, uncovering a family secret in the process. Reprint.
This early work by S. S. Van Dine was originally published in 1938 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. 'The Gracie Allen Murder Case' is one of Van Dine's novels of crime and mystery. S. S. Van Dine was born Willard Huntington Wright in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1888. He attended St. Vincent College, Pomona College and Harvard University, but failed to graduate, leaving to cultivate contacts he had made in the literary world. At the age of twenty-one, Wright began his professional writing career as literary editor of the Los Angeles Times. In 1926, Wright published his first S. S. Van Dine novel, The Benson Murder Case. Wright went on to write eleven more mysteries. The first few books about his upper-class amateur sleuth, Philo Vance, were so popular that Wright became wealthy for the first time in his life. His later books declined in popularity as the reading public's tastes in mystery fiction changed, but during the late twenties and early thirties his work was very successful.
The Winter Murder Case (1939) is a Philo Vance novella that S. S. Van Dine intended to expand into his twelfth full length book, a project cut short by his death. The Winter Murder Case seems especially similar to the B mystery movies of the 1930s, a cross between Van Dine's usual style and the film style. It was intended as a vehicle for Sonja Henie.