{"id":19329,"date":"2024-02-12T20:41:28","date_gmt":"2024-02-13T01:41:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=19329"},"modified":"2024-02-12T20:41:28","modified_gmt":"2024-02-13T01:41:28","slug":"the-bishop-murder-case-by-s-s-van-dine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/?p=19329","title":{"rendered":"‘The Bishop Murder Case,’ by S. S. Van Dine"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Tonight, another mystery classic.<\/strong> 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 \u201cthe most asinine character in detective fiction,\u201d and now that I\u2019ve read The Bishop Murder Case<\/a><\/em>, I can\u2019t argue with him (though that was before Lawrence Sanders invented Archy McNally).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019t operate without the young twit\u2019s 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\u2019s daughter. But when a cryptic note is delivered to a newspaper, associating the killing with the nursery rhyme, \u201cWho Killed Cock Robin?\u201d, 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 \u2013 just the sort of thing at which Philo Vance excels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What did I dislike about The Bishop Murder Case<\/em>? First of all, the prose was stilted, over-long, and unnatural. The dialogue doesn\u2019t sound like anything real people (even dilettantes) would say, and the narrative includes such lines as \u201c\u2019Sit down, Pyne,\u2019 said Vance, with peremptory kindness.\u201d (What does \u201cperemptory kindness\u201d mean?) There are some similarities to Dorothy Sayers\u2019 Lord Peter Wimsey, but Lord Peter was always self-aware, and he played his eccentricities for laughs. Vance is singularly humorless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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(!).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By this time in history, we\u2019re 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 \u2013 to the extent that he actually takes the lead in their interrogations \u2013 is hard to swallow. They even let him bully them into breaking into a house without a warrant (in a very good cause, I\u2019ll admit, but it was still implausible). The bulk of the district attorney\u2019s business, it appears, is conducted at the stylish Stuyvesant Club, where Vance is also a member. \u00a0Also, a man is held in jail on suspicion long after events have pretty clearly demonstrated his innocence. Apparently habeus corpus <\/em>doesn\u2019t exist in Philo Vance\u2019s world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a Norwegian character here, and I have to say I hated him cordially (among his other sins, he\u2019s an Ibsen fan).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The author, S. S. Van Dine, is an interesting \u2013 and perhaps revealing \u2013 case study. His real name was Willard Huntington Wright, and he was a prominent art critic in the early 20th<\/sup> 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\u2019t great at its best, if The Bishop Murder Case<\/em> is any indication.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In short, I did not enjoy The Bishop Murder Case<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cthe most asinine character in detective fiction,\u201d and now that I\u2019ve read The Bishop … Continue reading ‘The Bishop Murder Case,’ by S. S. Van Dine<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7,15],"tags":[5071,5070,5072],"class_list":["post-19329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiction","category-reviews","tag-philo-vance","tag-s-s-van-dine","tag-the-bishop-murder-case"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19329"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19330,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19329\/revisions\/19330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brandywinebooks.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}