The Winter Murder Case

by S. S. Van Dine

  He sent a look of appeal across the room to the woman. She had regained her poise and looked back at him coldly.

  “But I never had sufficient income to take care of her,” Quayne continued. “My practice had dwindled to a point where the Rexon fee was all I could count on. In the many years of my association here, stealing the emeralds never occurred to me. The scheme was Bassett’s. But I was an easy prey to his designing chicanery… Wallen interrupted our first attempt, and it became necessary to get rid of him. I had the spanner with me and used it to fracture Wallen’s skull. Then we dragged him to the cliff and threw him over. It looked as if we were safe; and I wanted to quit then. But Bassett held this second crime over my head more ominously than the first. I had no choice but to go on…”

  He paused briefly, then resumed.

  “You’ve shrewdly guessed, Mr. Vance, how Bassett obtained the key for me… Late last night I met him just outside the grounds to divide the gems. Distrusting him as I did, I took the spanner along as a precaution. There was a violent dispute. He threatened me, and I used the spanner again… The rest you know.”

  Quayne rose suddenly. O’Leary did likewise, a pair of manacles in one hand. Vance made a negative gesture. The doctor looked about him with clouded eyes. One hand moved slowly from his vest pocket to his mouth…

  He was immediately catapulted back to the divan, in horrible convulsions. In a few seconds he was still.

  “Odor of bitter almonds,” Vance commented calmly. “Cyanide… Wiser than I thought. Leaves us without any problem. Eliminates the second actor in the dual performance.”

  A hush fell over the room. Two or three minutes passed.

  O’Leary broke the silence. “But, Mr. Vance, how did you get a line on that wrench?”

  “It wasn’t over difficult,” drawled Vance. “There were two factors missin’ in the pattern. The time element, and the lethal instrument. The first was cleared up when I realized their clever ruse built round the siren. The second dawned on me when Quayne returned with you this afternoon from viewing Bassett’s body. He brought a noticeable aroma of gasoline with him. And I was reminded of an evening earlier in the week when he spoke of priming the engine of his car instead of using the starter. There are two tools with which to remove the spark plugs for this process: a socket wrench, or a spanner… You will recall the nature of the injuries on Wallen’s skull and on Bassett’s. A linear depressed fracture over the thin temporal bone. A crushing blow with a stout steel wrench would do the trick. I mentioned just such a weapon as a possibility on the morning Wallen was found.”

  Vance paused to light a cigarette.

  “Ordin’rily, of course, the murderous weapon is disposed of as quickly as possible. But in this case it must of necessity be kept on hand to loosen the spark plugs. I was convinced it would be found within easy reach—on the floor of his car, perhaps… Is that correct, Lieutenant?”

  O’Leary nodded admiringly. “But, Mr. Vance,” he said somewhat sheepishly, “suppose you hadn’t been on the veranda when that siren sounded? Quayne couldn’t count on your presence at the right moment.”

  “Obviously not. That wouldn’t have mattered. He counted on Miss Joan and Miss Ella. Served his purpose admirably. Perhaps better, in fact. And yet… I don’t know. He would have insisted on bringing the point up. He considered it his irrefutable ‘out,’ don’t y’ know…”

  “And how,” asked Carrington Rexon, “did Bassett manage to come in here without my seeing him?”

  “Didn’t you say you were out of the room, old friend?” Vance drew deeply on his Régie. “The man was patient. He was playing for big odds…”

  Carlotta Naesmith burst into the room. “The poor kid’s all tired out, Sir Galahad. But she says you told her to keep on skating.”

  Vance quickly stepped before the limp figure of Quayne on the divan. “Thank you, Miss Naesmith. I’ll tell her in a moment that it’s all right now. We’ll all be joining you.”

  “Please, Sir Galahad, let me tell her.” Miss Naesmith whisked from the room before Vance could reply.

  The guests left Rexon Manor the next morning. Richard Rexon, too, was to drive to New York with Vance and me later in the day. Carlotta Naesmith and Stanley Sydes were the last to take their departure. We formed a somewhat subdued group on the veranda as Higgins carried their bags out.

  Miss Naesmith stopped on the terrace. “You’ll mail me your new address, Dick?” she called back. “I’ll be sending you picture postcards from Cocos Island. I hope you’ll like that, Dick.”

  A smile of understanding passed between the two as Carrington Rexon knit his brows.

  Sydes, still on the veranda, called out: “You mean that, Goddess?”

  “Nothing else but,” she replied as she ran to the car. “When do we start?”

  “As soon as we can get to the yacht, darling.” And Sydes went after her.

  A little later Vance was in Carrington Rexon’s den bidding him adieu.

  “The ingratitude of our young folks,” Rexon complained bitterly. “I don’t know what the world is coming to.”

  “Really, now, it isn’t that bad,” Vance said sympathetically. “And wasn’t it you, Squire Rexon, who said something about the human heart desiring happiness for others?”

  Rexon looked up at him, and a new light came slowly into his eyes.

  Richard came in. “You’ll see that Higgins gets my trunks off, Dad?”

  “Certainly, my boy. Take care of yourself… And—before you go, son, will you bring Ella in here to me.”

  Walking out with a smile on his lips, Vance left the two together.

  The following essay by S.S. Van Dine, originally entitled “The Twenty Rules of Writing Detective Stories,” first appeared in the September 1928 edition of The American Magazine and is reprinted here by kind permission of the author’s estate.

  Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories

  The detective story is a kind of intellectual game. It is more—it is a sporting event. And the author must play fair with the reader. He can no more resort to trickeries and deceptions and still retain his honesty than if he cheated in a bridge game. He must outwit the reader, and hold the reader’s interest, through sheer ingenuity. For the writing of detective stories there are very definite laws—unwritten, perhaps, but nonetheless binding; and every respectable and self-respecting concocter of literary mysteries lives up to them.

  Herewith, then, is a sort of Credo, based partly on the practice of all the great writers of detective stories, and partly on the promptings of the honest author’s inner conscience. To wit:

  1. The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described.

  2. No wilful tricks or deceptions may be played on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself.

  3. There must be no love interest in the story. To introduce amour is to clutter up a purely intellectual experience with irrelevant sentiment. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar.

  4. The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the culprit. This is bald trickery, on a par with offering some one a bright penny for a five-dollar gold piece. It’s false pretenses.

  5. The culprit must be determined by logical deductions—not by accident or coincidence or unmotivated confession. To solve a criminal problem in this latter fashion is like sending the reader on a deliberate wild goose chase, and then telling him, after he has failed, that you had the object of his search up your sleeve all the time. Such an author is no better than a practical joker.

  6. The detective novel must have a detective in it; and a detective is not a detective unless he detects. His function is to gather clues that will eventually lead to the person who did the dirty work in the first chapter; and if the detective does not reach his conclusions through an analysis of
those clues, he has no more solved his problem than the schoolboy who gets his answer out of the back of the arithmetic.

  7. There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better. No lesser crime than murder will suffice. Three hundred pages is far too much pother for a crime other than murder. After all, the reader’s trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded. Americans are essentially humane, and therefore a tiptop murder arouses their sense of vengeance and horror. They wish to bring the perpetrator to justice; and when “murder most foul, as in the best it is,” has been committed, the chase is on with all the righteous enthusiasm of which the thrice gentle reader is capable.

  8. The problem of the crime must be solved by strictly naturalistic means. Such methods for learning the truth as slate-writing, ouija boards, mind reading, spiritualistic séances, crystal-gazing, and the like, are taboo. A reader has a chance when matching his wits with a rationalistic detective, but if he must compete with the world of spirits and go chasing about the fourth dimension of metaphysics, he is defeated ab initio.

  9. There must be but one detective—that is, but one protagonist of deduction—one deus ex machina. To bring the minds of three or four, or sometimes a gang of detectives to bear on a problem is not only to disperse the interest and break the direct thread of logic, but to take an unfair advantage of the reader, who, at the outset, pits his mind against that of the detective and proceeds to do mental battle. If there is more than one detective the reader doesn’t know who his co-deductor is. It’s like making the reader run a race with a relay team.

  10. The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story—that is, a person with whom the reader is familiar and in whom he takes an interest. For a writer to fasten the crime, in the final chapter, on a stranger or person who has played a wholly unimportant part in the tale, is to confess to his inability to match wits with the reader.

  11. Servants—such as butlers, footmen, valets, gamekeepers, cooks, and the like—must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. It is unsatisfactory, and makes the reader feel that his time has been wasted. The culprit must be a decidedly worthwhile person—one that wouldn’t ordinarily come under suspicion; for if the crime was the sordid work of a menial, the author would have had no business to embalm it in book form.

  12. There must be but one culprit, no matter how many murders are committed. The culprit may, of course, have a minor helper or co-plotter, but the entire onus must rest on one pair of shoulders: the entire indignation of the reader must be permitted to concentrate on a single black nature.

  13. Secret societies, camorras, mafias, et al., have no place in a detective story. Here the author gets into adventure fiction and secret-service romance. A fascinating and truly beautiful murder is irremediably spoiled by any such wholesale culpability. To be sure, the murderer in a detective novel should be given a sporting chance, but it is going too far to grant him a secret society (with its ubiquitous havens, mass protection, etc.) to fall back on. No high-class, self-respecting murderer would want such odds in his jousting-bout with the police.

  14. The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be rational and scientific. That is to say, pseudoscience and purely imaginative and speculative devices are not to be tolerated in the roman policier. For instance, the murder of a victim by a newly found element—a super-radium, let us say—is not a legitimate problem. Nor may a rare and unknown drug, which has its existence only in the author’s imagination, be administered. A detective-story writer must limit himself, toxicologically speaking, to the pharmacopoeia. Once an author soars into the realm of fantasy, in the Jules Verne manner, he is outside the bounds of detective fiction, cavorting in the uncharted reaches of adventure.

  15. The truth of the problem must at all times be apparent—provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it. By this I mean that if the reader, after learning the explanation for the crime, should reread the book, he would see that the solution had, in a sense, been staring him in the face—that all the clues really pointed to the culprit—and that, if he had been as clever as the detective, he could have solved the mystery himself without going on to the final chapter. That the clever reader does often thus solve the problem goes without saying. And one of my basic theories of detective fiction is that, if a detective story is fairly and legitimately constructed, it is impossible to keep the solution from all readers. There will inevitably be a certain number of them just as shrewd as the author; and if the author has shown the proper sportsmanship and honesty in his statement and projection of the crime and its clues, these perspicacious readers will be able, by analysis, elimination and logic, to put their finger on the culprit as soon as the detective does. And herein lies the zest of the game. Herein we have an explanation for the fact that readers who would spurn the ordinary “popular” novel will read detective stories unblushingly.

  16. A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no “atmospheric” preoccupations. Such matters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction. They hold up the action, and introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a successful conclusion. To be sure, there must be a sufficient descriptiveness and character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude; but when an author of a detective story has reached that literary point where he has created a gripping sense of reality and enlisted the reader’s interest and sympathy in the characters and the problem, he has gone as far in the purely “literary” technique as is legitimate and compatible with the needs of a criminal-problem document. A detective story is a grim business, and the reader goes to it not for literary furbelows and style and beautiful descriptions and the projection of moods, but for mental stimulation and intellectual activity—just as he goes to a ball game or to a crossword puzzle. Lectures between innings at the Polo Grounds on the beauties of nature would scarcely enhance the interest in the struggle between two contesting baseball nines; and dissertations on etymology and orthography interspersed in the definitions of a crossword puzzle would tend only to irritate the solver bent on making the words interlock correctly.

  17. A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt of a crime in a detective story. Crimes by housebreakers and bandits are the province of the police department—not of authors and brilliant amateur detectives. Such crimes belong to the routine work of the Homicide Bureaus. A really fascinating crime is one committed by a pillar of a church, or a spinster noted for her charities.

  18. A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide. To end an odyssey of sleuthing with such an anticlimax is to play an unpardonable trick on the reader. If a book buyer should demand his two dollars back on the ground that the crime was a fake, any court with a sense of justice would decide in his favor and add a stinging reprimand to the author who thus hoodwinked a trusting and kindhearted reader.

  19. The motives for all crimes in detective stories should be personal. International plottings and war politics belong in a different category of fiction—in secret-service tales, for instance. But a murder story must be kept gemütlich, so to speak. It must reflect the reader’s everyday experiences, and give him a certain outlet for his own repressed desires and emotions.

  20. And (to give my Credo an even score of items) I herewith list a few of the devices which no self-respecting detective-story writer will now avail himself of. They have been employed too often, and are familiar to all true lovers of literary crime. To use them is a confession of the author’s ineptitude and lack of originality.

  (a) Determining the identity of the culprit by comparing the butt of a cigarette left at the scene of the crime with the brand smoked by a suspect.

  (b) The bogus spiritualistic séance to frighten the culprit into giving
himself away.

  (c) Forged fingerprints.

  (d) The dummy-figure alibi.

  (e) The dog that does not bark and thereby reveals the fact that the intruder is familiar.

  (f) The final pinning of the crime on a twin, or a relative who looks exactly like the suspected, but innocent, person.

  (g) The hypodermic syringe and the knockout drops.

  (h) The commission of the murder in a locked room after the police have actually broken in.

  (i) The word-association test for guilt.

  (j) The cipher, or code letter, which is eventually unravelled by the sleuth.

  We hope you enjoyed following Philo Vance through his final adventure in The Winter Murder Case. If you missed a few earlier episodes, fear not! All twelve novels in the series are available from Felony & Mayhem, wherever fine books are sold. And to whet your appetite, we’re offering the opening chapters of Philo’s first outing, The Benson Murder Case; read on to see how it all began…

  THE BENSON MURDER CASE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Philo Vance at Home

  (Friday, June 14; 8.30 a.m.)

  IT HAPPENED THAT, on the morning of the momentous June the fourteenth when the discovery of the murdered body of Alvin H. Benson created a sensation which, to this day, has not entirely died away, I had breakfasted with Philo Vance in his apartment. It was not unusual for me to share Vance’s luncheons and dinners, but to have breakfast with him was something of an occasion. He was a late riser, and it was his habit to remain incommunicado until his midday meal.

  The reason for this early meeting was a matter of business—or, rather, of æsthetics. On the afternoon of the previous day Vance had attended a preview of Vollard’s collection of Cézanne watercolors at the Kessler Galleries, and having seen several pictures he particularly wanted, he had invited me to an early breakfast to give me instructions regarding their purchase.