The Evaporation of the Extraordinary Gentleman: S. S. Van Dine's Rules

Abstract

16 WLT NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2015 T he name of Philo Vance, gentleman detective, is rarely recognized today. Yet from the publication of The Benson Murder Case (1926) and the subsequent eleven novels into the early 1940s, he was one of the most popular fictional detectives in America, even rating a Philo Vance board game from Parker Brothers. Urbane, peremptory, and upper class, Vance was quickly brought to the movies in 1929 in a silent production (The Canary Murder Case) that was adapted for sound. William Powell played Vance several years before he won an Oscar nomination for playing Dashiell Hammett’s Nick Charles. Basil Rathbone played Vance almost a decade before he became one of the screen’s mostloved Sherlock Holmes. Warren William played Vance before he played the Sam Spade character (renamed Ted Shane) in the second version of The Maltese Falcon. Other actors, like Paul Lukas and Wilfrid Hyde-White, also played Vance, in a string of about fifteen movies until 1947. A Philo Vance radio drama went off the air in 1950, although by then, as in the later movies, much of his original characterization had been revised. His name was still a commodity at that point, even though his identity was not. As television grew, Vance became little more than the memory of his name. In many ways, Philo Vance is like the fictional detective who began it all, Poe’s Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin. He’s a brilliant, detached observer of human behavior but quite cynical about it. An aristocrat, he is an intellectual snob—a highly educated dilettante with impeccable manners but often bored. In the first few minutes of The Kennel Murder Case, William Powell perfectly captures the character of Vance in his supercilious enunciation of “whom,” The Evaporation of the Extraordinary Gentleman S. S. Van Dine’s Rules by J. Madison Davis crime & mystery right Detail from a film poster for The Benson Murder Case, released by Paramount Pictures in 1930, directed by Frank Tuttle and starring William Powell as Philo Vance. WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 17 a pronoun rarely employed by noir heroes. Like Dupin, Vance seems to lack even the suggestions of humanity in Sherlock Holmes, who is no one’s idea of a great guy to hang with—except for Watson, of course. Vance has his Watson, too. “S. S. Van Dine” records Vance’s activities, and S. S. Van Dine is also the pseudonym of the author, so the author makes himself into a fictional character who is the author of his own books. Got that? Derrida would have had no problem with it. Born Willard Huntington Wright, Van Dine adopted his nom de plume after a somewhat notable career as a critic of art and literature. Often a vicious commentator , he championed the avant-garde work of his time—D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Gabriele D’Annunzio, and Ezra Pound—and predicted a future in which abstract painting would dominate realistic painting. He was not sympathetic to detective fiction, but after a period of drug dependency and a bogus accusation that he was a spy for imperial Germany, Wright lived hand-to-mouth, suffered a nervous breakdown, and, in bedridden recovery, read numerous detective novels. After analyzing the form in an influential 1926 article in Scribner’s, Wright submitted a proposal for a trilogy of his own detective novels to editor Maxwell Perkins. The publication of The Benson Murder Case followed rapidly, and “S. S. Van Dine” was a best-selling author. For a person with lofty standards who had written serious essays and a book on Nietzsche (1915) and The Creative Will (1916), he seems to have justified his condescending to the detective novel in the first paragraphs of his Scribner’s article in saying that different standards apply to different genres. To try to apply the standards of Parsifal to The Mikado, or of Michelangelo to Degas, is unjust. “In fact,” he wrote, “they are unable to fulfill each other’s function ; and the reader who, at different times, can enjoy both without intellectual conflict, can never substitute the one for the other.” Perhaps this is merely the rationalization of a man whose own literary novel...