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Philo Vance

kevinburtonsmith

Created by S.S. Van Dine
Pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright
(1888-1939)

“Philo Vance
Needs a kick in the pance.”
— Ogden Nash

Yes, yes, yes. As several people have pointed out to me over the years, PHILO VANCE was a private eye, and it would be unfair for me to exclude him from this site.

Happy, now?

Granted, Vance was about as far from the commonly accepted vision of the private eye as you can get — he was an urbane, sophisticated and debonair member of New York’s upper crust totally lacking in the common touch who did not suffer fools — or anyone else below his station — gladly (or quietly). He was an avowed expert — just ask him —  in art, criminology, ancient Egypt, fencing, a talented polo player, classical music, show dogs, chess, winning horse racing and poker. He always wore his chamois gloves when he left his swank, book-lined downtown apartment, to tool around town in his beloved Hispano-Suiz. Hell, he even sported a monocle.

And — get this — he wasn’t being played for laughs.

We were meant to take this pretentious upper class doofus — and the dry, humourless books he appeared in — seriously. And he was taken seriously — for years he was America’s most popular homegrown detective, inspiring games, toys, films, radio and television series and even a daily newspaper comic strip.

He remains one of the most pivotal of fictional detectives, culturally and historically significant, and totally important in the development of the genre as a whole, and perhaps more importantly, seemed like a man of his time — an American man of his time.

Except…

Read today, Vance comes off as a pompous blowhard and know-it-all; an inexplicably popular character with his monocle and smug sense of moral, intellectual and class superiority whose very existence may have in fact spurred the demand for a tougher, more “realistic” American kind of detective (Vance, Race Williams and the Continental Op were all contemporaries).

But it’s not just me who has problems with the dude. Otto Penzler suggested in The Detectionary that the author himself was “much like Vance … a poseur and a dilettante, dabbling in art, music and criticism.”

And Chandler tagged him as “the most asinine character in detective fiction.”

Still, the books kept coming, starting in 1926 with The Benson Murder Case and continuing for eleven sequels.

Just three years after the first novel appeared, the second in the series, The Canary Murder Case (1927), was adapted for film, with future Thin Man star William Powell playing the monocoled one in a film that began as a silent film and switched to a talkie midway through production. Powell would go on to reprise the role several times, and other actors also took a crack at Vance over the years, including Warren William and Basil Rathbone. Paramount churned out a dozen of them between 1929 and 1939, and Warner Brothers gave it a crack with Calling Philo Vance (1940), while PRC attempted to revive the series in 1947 with three films which re-cast Vance as a hard-boiled (or at least slightly harder-boiled) dick. Most of the films are hit-or-miss, with Powell and Rathbone the most successful at adding just enough charm to give the character more palatable to appease the audience — many of the other films not even trying.

Far more enjoyable were the three radio shows that popped up in the forties. According to The Digital Deli Too, a web site that that “the Golden Age of Radio” very seriously, “The bottom line here is, there are no bad episodes of Philo Vance. The franchise seems to have maintained the highest standards of plot integrity and compelling mystery through all three incarnations of its production runs.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Vance’s creator, S.S. Van Dine (real name Willard Huntington Wright), was at various times a respected art critic, a drug addict (opiates, apparently), a columnist, a Harvard dropout (he felt he was smarter than most of his professors), an author of a book on Nietzsche, the literary editor for the Los Angeles Times, a notorious man about town with a taste for women and booze, the editor of H.L. Mencken’s The Smart Set, a smoker of marijuana, and was accused of being a spying for the Germans after the U.S. had entered World War I, the result of a prank gone wrong. The resulting scandal, though, cost him his career in journalism, and he spent several years mooching off friends and doing drugs, before deciding to write mysteries. He signed a three-book contract with Maxwell Perkins at Scribners (Perkins as an old pal from Harvard acquaintance), and the rest was publishing history, with sales rivaling his day as Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. Naturally, none of this went to his head.

Unfortunately, after a good long run, sales of the Philo Vance books began to slip, and Vance, once a man of his time, seemed suddenly dated, as a newer, tougher breed of American detective  began to take hold, and the last few novels veered into formula. Still, by 1938, Van Dine was arguably America’s best selling mystery author, and he was living large, thanks to the Philo Vance novels and films. He lived in a swank penthouse on Central Park West. He raised prize-winning terriers at a private kennel in New Jersey, and had 86 aquariums full of tropical fish. He was a regular at various casinos and racetracks, and swigged copious amounts of brandy and, it was rumoured, other less controlled substances. He signed more movie deals and wrote more Vance books, and didn’t always pay his debts, which may explain why he appeared in ads for both Hiram Walker Gin and General Electric Radios late in his life. In February 1939, while working on the final Philo Vance novel, The Winter Murder Case, he had a heart attack and died at the age of in 1939, only fifty or so, reportedly a “bitter and disillusioned” man, a victim of years of hard living and drinking, leaving less than $15,000 in his estate, still a considerable chunk at the time.

UNDER OATH

NOVELS

ALSO OF INTEREST

FILMS

ALSO OF INTEREST

COMIC STRIPS

RADIO

RELATED LINKS

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Thanks, as always, to Janice Long for the heads up, and to The Digital Deli Too, for the radio logs.

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