Tonight, another mystery classic. I was familiar with the name of the author, S. S. Van Dine, but I knew his Philo Vance character only through old movies (William Powell was the first to play him). Raymond Chandler called Philo Vance “the most asinine character in detective fiction,” and now that I’ve read The Bishop Murder Case, I can’t argue with him (though that was before Lawrence Sanders invented Archy McNally).
Philo Vance, New York City esthete and amateur detective, is called upon by the district attorney (who has apparently decided, after a couple of cases, that he can’t operate without the young twit’s help) to visit the home of the mathematician Prof. Dillard. In an archery range next to the house, a young friend of the family has been found killed by an arrow. Suspicion immediately falls on another young male friend, a rival for the affections of the professor’s daughter. But when a cryptic note is delivered to a newspaper, associating the killing with the nursery rhyme, “Who Killed Cock Robin?”, they all realize that this was part of a cold-blooded plan. When other murders, all with Mother Goose themes, follow, it comes down to breaking alibis and analyzing personalities – just the sort of thing at which Philo Vance excels.
What did I dislike about The Bishop Murder Case? First of all, the prose was stilted, over-long, and unnatural. The dialogue doesn’t sound like anything real people (even dilettantes) would say, and the narrative includes such lines as “’Sit down, Pyne,’ said Vance, with peremptory kindness.” (What does “peremptory kindness” mean?) There are some similarities to Dorothy Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey, but Lord Peter was always self-aware, and he played his eccentricities for laughs. Vance is singularly humorless.
Secondly, Vance relies heavily on very simplistic Freudian psychology, which has not aged well. The author goes so far as to affirm that extreme (even cruel) cynicism is a sign of mental health, because it eases repressions(!).
By this time in history, we’re used to seeing amateur sleuths in fiction working in cooperation with the official police, but the kind of slavish devotion the police in this book show to Philo Vance – to the extent that he actually takes the lead in their interrogations – is hard to swallow. They even let him bully them into breaking into a house without a warrant (in a very good cause, I’ll admit, but it was still implausible). The bulk of the district attorney’s business, it appears, is conducted at the stylish Stuyvesant Club, where Vance is also a member. Also, a man is held in jail on suspicion long after events have pretty clearly demonstrated his innocence. Apparently habeus corpus doesn’t exist in Philo Vance’s world.
There’s a Norwegian character here, and I have to say I hated him cordially (among his other sins, he’s an Ibsen fan).
The author, S. S. Van Dine, is an interesting – and perhaps revealing – case study. His real name was Willard Huntington Wright, and he was a prominent art critic in the early 20th century. He was also a cocaine addict and a German sympathizer during World War I. When his career foundered, he took up writing mysteries, despite the fact that he despised the genre. In an exquisite irony of fate, his books proved popular, and he came to depend on them for a living. Applying a little Freudian psychology of my own, I wonder how much his self-hatred contributed to the generally acknowledged deterioration of his work over time. (And it wasn’t great at its best, if The Bishop Murder Case is any indication.)
In short, I did not enjoy The Bishop Murder Case. It dragged on and on, annoying me increasingly as I read. Recommended only if you want to fill a hole in your education in Golden Age mystery stories.