Philo Vance

It gives us considerable pleasure to be able to offer to the public the "inside" record of those of former District Attorney Markham's criminal cases in which Mr. Philo Vance figured so effectively. The true inwardness of these famous cases has never before been revealed by S. S. Van Dine, Mr. Vance's lawyer and almost constant companion, being the only person who possessed a complete record of the facts and has only recently been permitted to make them public.After inspecting Mr. Van Dine's voluminous notes, we decided to publish The Benson Murder Case as the first of the series-not because it was the most interesting and startling, nor yet the most complicated and dramatic from the fictional point of view, but because, coming first chronologically, it explains how Mr. Philo Vance happened to become involved in criminal matters, and also because it possesses certain features that reveal very clearly Mr. Vance's unique analytic methods of crime detection. If you will refer to the municipal statistics of the City of New York, you will find that the number of unsolved major crimes during the four years that John F.-X. Markham was District Attorney was far smaller than under any of his predecessors' administrations. Markham projected the District Attorney's office into all manner of criminal investigations; and, as a result, many abstruse crimes on which the Police had hopelessly gone aground were eventually disposed of. But although he was personally credited with the many important indictments and subsequent convictions that he secured, the truth is that he was only an instrument in many of his most famous cases. The man who actually solved them and supplied the evidence for their prosecution was in no way connected with the city's administration, and never once came into the public eye.I am not permitted to divulge the man's name, and, for that reason, I have chosen, arbitrarily, to refer to him throughout these ex-officio reports as Philo Vance. We now hear the story told by author S. S. Van Dine as though Vance were a real person.

Crimes possess all the basic factors of a work of art-approach, conception, technique, imagination, attack, method, and organization. “The Benson Murder Case” introduces S. S. Van Dine's brilliant and iconic detective to the world in one of the most popular detective novels of the twentieth century, inspired by the real-life murder of a famous bridge player. Alvin Benson is found slumped over an easy chair in a room locked from the inside with a bullet in his head, and Wall Street and the high society of Manhattan are set ablaze with the news of the playboy stockbroker's death. But when NYPD's top detectives and ballistics experts can't solve the mystery, it falls to Philo Vance, an art connoisseur and amateur sleuth, to find the killer. Vance's intellectual and artistic background helps him uncover a series of odd clues, starting with a missing toupee and false teeth, and soon he is delving deep into the case. In a Holmesian display of deduction, Vance also uses a recreation of the crime scene to determine several details about the killer-even down to their height. But he will have to uncover more than these small but vital details in order to find the real killer, deconstruct their alibi, and prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they in fact killed Alvin Benson. "With his highbrow manner and his parade of encyclopedic learning, Philo Vance is not only a detective; he is a god out of the machine."