The Scarab Murder Case (1930) by S.S. van Dine

Willard Huntington Wright was an art critic, editor and, under the non de plume "S.S. van Dine," one of the most celebrated and influential American mystery writer of his day – who brought the Golden Age of detective fiction to the United States. Van Dine penned a dozen novels between 1926 and 1939 about aesthete and dilettante detective, Philo Vance. A somewhat divisive character who inspired Ogden Nash to write the now famous line, "Philo Vance needs a kick in the pance." Van Dine and Vance have been criticized for their batty plots, dotty logic and Vance's erudition on any subject that happened to be at the heart of the plot. You name the subject and Vance can give you his expert, first-hand opinion on it. But they also have their champions. Mike Grost writes on his website, "the mystery field does not honor Van Dine enough" as "he tried to synthesize the best elements of mystery fiction in his work" and "in doing so he founded a new school, one that opened the door for some of the best detective writing in American history."

My own experience with Van Dine's detective fiction has been spotty. I remember immediately solving The Benson Murder Case (1926) and only recall The "Canary" Murder Case (1927) had a decent locked room-trick. The Greene Murder Case (1928) took an interesting approach to the structuring of a detective story, but hardly a beacon of fair play and read an annoying, poorly dated Dutch translation of The Bishop Murder Case (1929). I think, to the surprise of absolutely nobody, that The Kennel Murder Case (1932) is the best Philo Vance (locked room) mystery encountered, so far, but The Dragon Murder Case (1933) completely put me off Van Dine until now. A ludicrously bad detective story about a premeditated murder hinging on two unpredictable assumptions that somehow came off exactly like the murderer planned. It was so ridiculously insulting, the remaining Philo Vance novels were moved to the bottom of the pile.

So never got around to supposedly good novels like The Casino Murder Case (1934), The Garden Murder Case (1935) or The Kidnap Murder Case (1936), but enough water has passed under the bridge to give Van Dine and Vance a second shot. After all, this blog is littered with references to the Van Dine School and reviews of writers like Anthony Abbot, Kelley Roos, Roger Scarlett and Ellery Queen.

The Scarab Murder Case (1930) is Van Dine's fifth detective novels and brings Philo Vance to the East Twentieth Street home of a famous Egyptologist, Dr. Mindrum W. C. Bliss, where he maintained a private museum of Egyptian antiquities – crammed with ancient treasures and trinkets. Dr. Bliss employs an archaeologist and technical expert, Donald Scarlett, who happened to be an old college mate of Vance and turned to him when he made a unsettling discovery in the private museum. Scarlett came to New York with Dr. Bliss as a member of his staff and went to the museum that morning to classify a batch of photographs, but found the body of "that old philanthropist and art patron," Benjamin H. Kyle, lying crumpled in the corner of the room. Kyle's skull had been crushed like an eggshell with a two-foot long statue of the Egyptian goddess of vengeance, Sakhmet, still lying across his head. And his arms encircling the feet of the feet of a life-sized statue of Anubis. The god of the underworld. There are a ton of highly incriminating clues, "the scarab pin, the financial report, and the footprints," which lead straight to Dr. Bliss. Vance warns Markham and Sgt. Heath not to rush to an arrest as "a devilish plot" (is there any other in this series?) has been introduced into Kyle's murder and unraveling that hideous scheme will save an innocent person from the electric chair ("a single false step on our part, and the plot will succeed").

So the story follows the fairly typical pattern of these 1920s and '30s Van Dine-Queen style brownstone mysteries with the lion's share taking place inside the walls of the East Twentieth Street brownstone and the private museum. The scene of the crime and uncovered clues are as closely scrutinized as the other members of the household. There's the wife of Dr. Bliss, Meryt-Amen, who's half Egyptian and her faithful family retainer, Anûpu Hani. A Coptic Christian, of sorts, who believes the murder was Sakhmet's vengeance for the desecration of Egypt's tombs. Lastly, the Assistant Curator of the Bliss Museum and Kyle's nephew, Robert Salveter. So a good, old-fashioned murder mystery with "the mystic and fantastic lore of ancient Egypt" with "its confused mythology and its grotesque pantheon of beast-headed
gods" furnishing the background of the story. Obviously trading on the Egyptian craze that gripped the West for nearly decades following Howard Carter's discovery of the long-lost tomb of Tutankhamen. But how does it all stack up?

First of all, The Scarab Murder Case marked Vance's fifth appearance and Van Dine evidently made some attempts to humanize Vance since debuting him in The Benson Murder Case. Vance still affects British mannerisms ("beastly mess, people getting murdered, what?") and is annoyingly up to date on all things Egyptological, which allows him to decipher a hieroglyphic letter ("let me see how well I remember my Egyptian... it's been years since I did any transliterating..."), but Vance is entirely motivated by preventing a miscarriage of justice and saving the reputations of his friends, Markham and Heath. Vance even show a glimmer of humor when Heath suggests he should have been a lawyer ("I'm only tryin' to save you and Mr. Markham from making a silly blunder. And what thanks do I get? I'm told I should have been a lawyer! Alack and welladay!"). A great improvement on his first appearance as The Benson Murder Case never answered the question how Markham resisted the urge to throttle Vance on the spot. Secondly, the treatment of clues and red herrings is fascinating. Markham refers to them as negative clues and direct clues, but, essentially, the red herrings the murderer planted at the murder scene become clues when Vance identified them as red herrings. That turns his normally annoyingly cryptic remarks into clues. So it's a pity the misdirection has worn a little thin nearly a 100 years after its original publication. I'm sure it worked like a train back in 1930, but, in 2023, it's only going to fool the newest, most innocently-eyed and unblemished of mystery fans.

However, while I spotted the murderer early in the game and cottoned on to all the clues, my only real bone of contention is how Vance disposed of the murderer. It's one thing to believe and lament "this elaborate invention of imbeciles, called the law, has failed to provide for the extermination of a dangerous and despicable criminal," but do the dirty work yourself. For someone of Vance's intellect, it would have been a mere parlor trick to improve on that preposterous death trap and have the murderer's death being written off as a cosmic coincidence or "divine justice." Other than that, The Scarab Murder Case has completely renewed my interest in Van Dine and will excavate The Casino Murder Case, The Kidnap Murder Case and English copy of The Bishop Murder Case from the depths of the big pile. Even more than that, The Scarab Murder Case made me want to reread Clyde B. Clason's The Man from Tibet (1938). So... to be continued.

Sic Semper Tyrannis: "The Audiophile Murder Case" (1982) by D.B. von Din (a.k.a. Barry Ergang)

Last month, I reviewed The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen (2020), edited by Josh Pachter and Dale C. Andrews, which is the second anthology of parodies, pastiches and homages celebrating the personification of the American detective story, "Ellery Queen" – shared pseudonym of the mystery writing cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. Rex Stout's elephantine sleuth and his right-hand man were honored in a similar themed anthology, The Misadventures of Nero Wolfe (2020). I ended my review with the observation that there's another well-known, American mystery novelist, namely S.S. van Dine, who should have enough material related to him to compile The Misadventures of Philo Vance. 

I know genre satirist, Jon L. Breen, wrote three pastiches, "The Austin Murder Case" (1967), "The Vanity Murder Case" (1970) and "The Circle Murder Case" (1972). "The Pinke Murder Case" by N.O.T. von Dime, collected in The Mixture As Before (1930), is an early parody of Van Dine and Vance (have not read it), while Ashibe Taku's "Taikun satsujin jiken" ("The Tycoon Murder Case," 2000) is a slightly more recent take on the Van Dinean detective story. There was a 1940s radio serial based on the characters, entitled Philo Vance, which probably has one or two scripts with interesting enough plots to include (e.g. "The Deathless Murder Case," 1949). Curt Evans wrote an amusing blog-post in 2018, "Philo in the Fifties," in which he speculates (tongue-in-cheek) "what Van Dine might have written had he lived, like Chandler, into the next two decades." An anthology like that can easily be "padded" out with the inclusion of John Riddle's obscure, long out-of-print and novel-length The John Riddell Murder Case: A Philo Vance Parody (1930). I think a lot of readers would appreciate it more than brief excerpts from larger works.

I'm sure there are more than enough short parodies, pastiches and homages to fill out an anthology. Serendipitously, I stumbled across one such parody/pastiche that turned out to be a pleasant surprised.

Barry Ergang is the former editor of Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine, winner of the Derringer Award and short story writer who penned the locked room mystery "The Play of Light and Shadow" (2004) and the short-short parody "Gideon Fell, Hardboiled Sawbones" (2003) – based on a comment by our very own Nick Fuller on the old GAD Yahoo group. During the first months of 1980, Ergang began working on pastiche that parodied both Van Dine's Philo Vance and the audio industry at the time. The story was titled "The Audiophile Murder Case" and was submitted was submitted and turned down by various mainstream hi-fi magazines, because the editors likely had a problem with the story's "less-than-charitable takes toward certain aspects of the industry" as well as "the possibility that some equipment manufacturers would be offended" and "thus cease purchasing advertisements." So a few years went by before the story was picked up by J. Gordon Holt, editor and reviewer of Stereophile, who began serializing the story in October, 1982.

Unfortunately, the story didn't make it into print quite like Ergang had envisioned it. This oversight was only rectified in 2019 when Ergang published a restored version of "The Audiophile Murder Case" as it was originally intended to be published. Surprisingly, it turned out to be a locked room mystery! So put on some synthwave as we go back to the '80s!

Winderley "Golden Ear" Manner was the editor, publisher and principle reviewer for Semper Fidelis, "a so-called "underground" audiophile journal," whose readers took his reviews as gospel. So he wielded the power to "virtually make or break a manufacturer," which went to his head and became "more and more authoritarian" as he gained subscribers and a reputation. This didn't made him very popular with manufacturers and retailers.

Manner occasionally invites people to his penthouse floor of a high-rise, New York apartment building to participate in a listening panel in his soundproof listening room. There were several people on the day of his murder who received such an invitation, Jason Linderman, Addison R. Corman and Selwyn Ericson. All of them work in the audio industry and all have an ax to grind with the editor/reviewer of Semper Fidelis, but, when they arrive at his penthouse, the door to the listening room is closed and apparently locked on the inside – which had to be removed from its hinges. Inside they discover Manner's body, gagged and wrists tied with copper wire, hanging from a noose with headphones on. Fortunately, that's the moment Manner's fourth guest arrives on the scene, Milo Rance. Besides being a detective extraordinaire, Rance has an ear tailored for "the niceties of sonic accuracy" (Manner "once asserted that Rance's ear was second only to his"). Now he has to figure who silenced Gold Ear in a locked room filled with amplifiers, turntables, tape decks and speakers.

I've to compliment Ergang here for how handled the locked room problem. When I learned the door was not locked, or bolted, but secured with a drop-latch, I was a little disappointed. The drop-latch suggested an obvious trick, under the circumstances, but Rance inspects the drop-latch ("swung like a pendulum") and concludes "the latch is too loose to have stayed poised until the door closes." So it could "not have been maneuvered into place" and "allowed to drop from vibration when the door was shut." The actual locked room-trick is a 1980s update of the kind of locked room trickery Van Dine was up to in his own novels, but the who-and why also hid a few genuine surprises. Mostly that the story gives the reader two different answers to those questions. The official solution is perfectly in line with the (neo) traditional detective story, but the ending suggested a second, unexpected, but actually foreshadowed, solution with an undeniably original motive attached to it. And that's what elevated "The Audiophile Murder Case" above the status of a mere pastiche or parody.

So, yes, Ergang's "The Audiophile Murder Case" was an unexpected, but welcome, discovery, which succeeded in parodying Philo Vance, but with a good enough plot to make it stand on its own as a detective story. The locked room angle was just the icing on the cake. Just one question. Where are the footnotes, Barry? You forgot the footnotes! Why did you forget the footnotes? The story is still incomplete without them! 

Notes for the curious: I previously reviewed two other locked room mysteries set among audiophiles and manufacturers. Herbert Resnicow's The Dead Room (1987) and Motohiro Katou's "Glass Room" from Q.E.D. vol. 15.

Seven Days to Disaster

"Espionage, my son, is far from being a joke in these days. It's wide and it’s deep and it sinks under your feet—like that water out there. It runs much deeper than it ever did twenty-five years ago."

- Sir Henry Merrivale (Carter Dickson's Nine-and Death Makes Ten a.k.a. Murder in the Submarine Zone, 1940)

The Lusitania Murders (2002) is the fourth entry in Max Allan Collins' remarkable, but sadly discontinued, "Disaster Series" that "combined the factual with the fanciful" by hurling celebrated writers of popular fiction in disastrous, world-altering events and have them solve a range of problems – just before tragedy strikes!

Jacques Futrelle was the spiritual father of one of the immortal detectives of the printed page, "The Thinking Machine," who perished on the R.M.S. Titanic in 1912, but The Titanic Murders (1999) gave him a proper sendoff. The Pearl Harbor Murders (2001) gave Edgar Rice Burroughs of Tarzan fame a murder to investigate on the island of Hawaii mere days before the devastating attack that pulled the United States into World War II. The London Blitz Murders (2004) pits Agatha Christie against a depraved serial-killer, known as the "The Blackout Ripper," when the city was being pounded by the Luftwaffe, but The War of the Worlds Murder (2005) remains my personal favorite – in which Walter B. Gibson comes to the rescue of Orson Welles during the infamous Panic Broadcast.

Willard Huntington Wright was a "trailblazing art critic" and an important avant-garde figure in pre-World War I New York City. Wright was a "caustic critic of popular fiction," but would gain everlasting fame in that realm of the literary world as the man who brought the British-style, puzzle-oriented mystery novel to the Americas and created one of the most irritating, know-it-all snobs in the genre – the wisenheimer known as Philo Vance.

However, that chapter of his career began in the mid-1920s with the publication of The Benson Murder Case (1926), but The Lusitania Murder is set during the first week of May, 1915, when the titular ship left New York for Liverpool, England on what would be her final voyage. During those days, Wright was still somewhat of an acid-tongued critic and a professional journalist.

Collins exercised his artistic license to place Wright aboard the Lusitania, under the guise of a reporter seeking interviews with some of the famous guests, which is an operation done under the familiar pseudonym of "S.S. van Dine." However, there's an ulterior motive for his presence aboard.

The Lusitania was a luxury liner that could be easily converted into a battleship and there are persistent rumors that, in its capacity as a passenger liner, the ship is used to transport "ammunition, weapons and perhaps even high explosives" into a war zone – effectively blurring the lines "between commerce and combat." It makes "Big Lucy" a potential target for U-boats and saboteurs. So, as "S.S. van Dine," Wright has to gauge the veracity of those rumors for an article, but he also has a slight personal interest in the matter as a public germanophile with a pro-German stance.

In reality, Wright was blacklisted from journalism for his German sympathies, which happened after the United States declared war on Germany in 1917. There were also accusations of Wright being a spy for Germany. The picture Collins painted of him had a bit more nuance, which stated that although his "tastes run to Wagner, Goethe and Schopenhauer" it shouldn't be assumed he wears "a photo of the Kaiser in a locket" near his heart – which nudged him slightly into the neutral corner.

Anyhow, there's not just a possible secret, unlisted cargo of war supplies that requires Wright's attention, but there's also a small group of German stowaways found after departing from New York. Are they spies, saboteurs or merely part of a ring of thieves targeting the valuables of the first-class passengers? Whatever the answer is, someone wants to them out of the way and soon they're being targeted by a brutal, devious murderer.

Luckily, Wright receives help from the ship's detective, Philomina Vance, who's a Pinkerton operative with the deductive-skill of storybook detective and plays the Sabina Carpenter to Wright's John Quincannon. It's up to them to figure out whether the murders are connected to the possible war-connection the ship has with the Allied war effort or to the mysterious telegrams that some of the more prominent passengers received before departure. Or simply a fallout among thieves.

Collins used some of the actual passengers for this part of the plot, because they included a who's-who of the rich and famous from the early 1900s. They include multi-millionaire Alfred Vanderbilt. Philosopher and writer Elbert Hubbard. A well-known American theatrical producer with German-Jewish roots named Charles Frohman. The Belgian fund-raiser Marie DePage. Which are just a few of the notable names.

This makes The Lusitania Murders a well-written and researched novel, which pleasantly blurred the lines between fact and fiction without becoming too implausible. It must be, however, noted that this entry paid more attention to the characters and the ambient setting that other books in the series, which may have something to do with the time-period in which the story was written – as it was written in the aftermath of the terrorist-attacks on September 11, 2001. Collins mentioned in his after word that "for a number of days" he "did not feel like playing the role of entertaining," which was particular troubling to "a writer in the process of creating a confection based around another tragedy of war."

So this probably gave characters, setting and the looming disaster a bit of a precedent over an Agatha Christie-style drawing room mystery. More than is usual in this series. However, that doesn't mean the story is bare of clues or a decent plot, which it has, and I feel confident in stating that both readers of detective-and historical fiction will find enough between the pages of The Lusitania Murders to loose the track of time for a couple of hours.

Finally, I want to point out that the foreword imagines Van Dine would titled this book The Lusitania Murder Case, which is an appealing title, but he preferred a six-letter word preceding the murder case-bit. I know he wrote The Gracie Allen Murder Case (1938), but that was an exception (and a bit of a sell-out). I think something along the lines of The Cunard Murder Case or The Kaiser Murder Case would've been closer to a Van Dine approved title for this book.

I guess this is as good to end yet another long, rambling and shabbily written review and urge you to read this series for yourself. I'd recommend The War of the Worlds Murder in particular, which is simply wonderful. And has Orson Welles as one of the main characters! 

The One-Man Book-Club

"To read of a detective’s daring finesse or ingenious stratagem is a rare joy."

- Rex Stout.

Until a few years ago, the message board of the John Dickson Carr collector website was not entirely unlike a disreputable alleyway, tugged away in an obscure gas-lit street of Sherlock Holmes' Victorian London, where the fugitive shadows of the city gathered to tell and boost of tales of haunting crimes and murder most foul. However, crime has the tendency to spread and soon we were absorbed by the blogosphere, which provided us with the tools necessary to brainwash the masses indoctrinate your children promote classically-styled mysteries, but it turned the JDC forum into a ghost town – and one thing I do miss, from time to time, are the one-man book-clubs.

A One-Man Book-Club is exactly what its name implies: you read a book and post your thoughts and theories as you go through the story. This resulted in some interesting "reviews," at least I think so, and because I have nothing else at the moment I decided to revisit a few of them.

One month before I began blogging, I read Lenore Glen Offord's The Glass Mask (1944) for one of these One-Man Book-Club threads and the first thing I noted that it was the kind of detective story that American mystery writers reputedly never wrote – set in a remote small-town unaffected by the passage of time and echoes the sleepy, country-side village of Miss Marple's St. Mary Mead. The problem is also one that could have been torn from the pages of an Agatha Christie novel: was an ailing and inoffensive matriarch murdered by her grandson to inherit her property and an opportunity to get married? According to the local gossip machine, he did, but it's impossible to proof as the remains were cremated and there are many other unanswered questions.

Offord's main characters, however, are not stock-in-trade and even ahead of their time. Georgina Wyeth is a single mother of an eight-year-old girl and has relation with her semi-official fiancé, pulp writer Todd McKinnon, but she's not your quintessential dunderheaded heroine entering dark cellars or abandoned houses on her own – and the book has its "Had-I-But-Known" moments. But the biggest triumph of this book is how the solution to the "perfect murder" is handled.

S.S. van Dine's The Dragon Murder Case (1934) was a disaster of a story that I had to abandon midway through, but not before taking a peek at Vance's explanation and discovered not only that I was partially correct but also that I was being to logical. If you’re curious, you have to read the original post where my observations are hidden behind proper spoiler-tags.

Darwin Teilhet was one of the first writers to address the atrocities committed by the nazi's, when Hitler rose to power, and used the detective story as his vehicle. The Talking Sparrow Murders (1934), set against the rise of the Third Reich, opens with the unlikely sight of a talking sparrow, imploring an elderly man to help him, moments before the man himself is shot. A cover-blurb pointed out that the book, atmosphere-wise, suggests the work of another American mystery writer, John Dickson Carr, and I agree. The story has a few nice touches of the macabre, the sparrow that spoke like a human and nazi officials going out of their way to bow to a lone pine-tree, but also a young American hero who's caught between a blitzkrieg of crime and the efficient Schutzmännen of the German police force.

Unfortunately, The Talking Sparrow Murders merges the spy-thriller with elements of the detective story, which left me in two minds, where I wanted more from the plot, but was nonetheless intrigued that it was published years before Hitler began WWII. This makes me want to give less weight to its shortcomings as a mystery. I mean, it's not an historical novel – it was written in 1934, and it turned out to be a glimpse of things yet to come!

My fall as a snobbish, cynical purist began to pick up momentum after reading William DeAndrea’s The HOG Murders (1979), which has a wonderfully conceived plot that connected the past with the present. A serial killer is bumping people off at random in a small town and sends taunting messages to the police, who turn to the famous criminologist Nicolo Benedetti, who I described at the time as a cross between Hercule Poirot and a hand tame Hannibal Lecter, and Ronald Gentry – a private-eye Benedetti personally trained. The plot has an original take on the serial killer story and I was on the right track, before DeAndrea effectively pulled the wool over my eyes.

It's follow-up, The Werewolf Murders (1992), was also subject of discussion in a One-Man Book-Club thread. The book was written and set during the waning years of the Twentieth Century and a French baron has organized the first Olympique Scientifique Internationale, a year-long gathering of the world's most prominent scientists, in preparation of the new and hopefully more enlightened millennium at the ski resort of Mont-st.-Denis. But then an astronomer is murdered and his body is draped across the eternal flame, situated in the town square, another scientist is brutally attacked, and before long, logic and reason begins to dissipate among the scientific community as the rumors of the Werewolf of Mont-st.-Denis begins to leave footprints on their nerves.

When the local authority with the assistance of a detective from the famous Sûreté fails to turn up any leads or even a viable suspect, everyone, once again, turns to that philosopher of crime and human evil, Professor Niccolo Benedetti, who also shows Nero Wolfe how to collect an enormous fee and still come across as the embodiment of generosity and patriotism. 

I was able to grasp the most significant parts of the solution, only missing out on some of the finer details and motive, and missed one very obvious clue.

Well, that’s it for this week’s filler and hope to back soon with a regular review. And beware, I have stocked up on locked room mysteries... again.