A sputter beside them, and Lieutenant Booth climbed on to the float, moist and panting. “Wha’s that?” he gurgled.
“She was speaking to me,” cried John Quincy triumphantly.
APPENDIX
The House Without a Key on Film
Between 1926 and 1981, Charlie Chan appeared in fifty-three films, all explored in detail in Charles P. Mitchell’s definitive A Guide to Charlie Chan Films (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1999). The first, The House Without a Key, was made by Pathé and released as a ten-chapter serial in November 1926; it has subsequently been lost. Mitchell provides the following information about the film:
“The basic plot [of the novel] was considerably altered, and concentrated on a chest that contained evidence of a twenty year old crime committed by one of a pair of rival brothers. The struggle for possession of this enigmatic chest made up the main action of the plot throughout the serial. The lead performer was screen veteran Walter Miller, former leading man for D. W. Griffith.
“The very first screen Chan was played by a Japanese actor named George Kuwa, who had appeared in bit parts in many productions such as the Rudolph Valentino film Moran of the Lady Letty (1922). His participation in the story was reduced to a minor, background character. Kuwa played Charlie as clean-shaven, wearing a dark business suit and an occasional white hat. Chan received eleventh billing in the original cast list.”
The chapter titles were:
The Spite Fence
The Mystery Box
The Missing Numeral
Suspicion
The Death Buoy
Sinister Shadows
The Mystery Man
The Spotted Menace
The Wrist Watch
The Culprit
A summary of each chapter may be found in Jim Stringham’s “Charlie Chan’s Number One Movie,” which first appeared in Cliffhangers 21 (May 1995) and is reprinted here: http://charliechanfamily.tripod.com/id90.html.
Facsimile first-edition dust jacket for The Benson Murder Case
THE BENSON
MURDER CASE1
A Philo Vance Story
BY
S. S. VAN DINE
“Mr. Mason,” he said, “I wish to thank you for my life.”
“Sir,” said Mason. “I had no interest in your life. The adjustment
of your problem was the only thing of interest to me.”
—Randolph Mason: Corrector of Destinies2
1.First published in October 1926.
2.The correct title is The Corrector of Destinies: Being Tales of Randolph Mason, as Related by his Private Secretary Courtlandt Parks, by Melville Davisson Post (1908). The collection of stories is a followup to Post’s The Strange Adventures of Randolph Mason (1896).
Contents
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
INTRODUCTORY
CHARACTERS OF THE BOOK
I. Philo Vance at Home
II. At the Scene of the Crime
III. A Lady’s Hand-bag
IV. The Housekeeper’s Story
V. Gathering Information
VI. Vance Offers an Opinion
VII. Reports and an Interview
VIII. Vance Accepts a Challenge
IX. The Height of the Murderer
X. Eliminating a Suspect
XI. A Motive and a Threat
XII. The Owner of a Colt-.45
XIII. The Grey Cadillac
XIV. Links in the Chain
XV. “Pfyfe—Personal”
XVI. Admissions and Suppressions
XVII. The Forged Check
XVIII. A Confession
XIX. Vance Cross-examines
XX. A Lady Explains
XXI. Sartorial Revelations
XXII. Vance Outlines a Theory
XXIII. Checking an Alibi
XXIV. The Arrest
XXV. Vance Explains His Methods
APPENDIX. S. S. Van Dine Sets Down Twenty Rules for Detective Stories
Publisher’s Note
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; for Mr. S. S. Van Dine, Mr. Vance’s lawyer and almost constant companion, being the only person who possessed a complete record of the facts, 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.
Introductory
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.
At that time I happened to be both legal advisor and personal friend of this other man; and it was thus that the strange and amazing facts of the situation became known to me. But not until recently have I been at liberty to make them public. Even now 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.
It is, of course, possible that some of his acquaintances may, through my revelations, be able to guess his identity; and if such should prove the case, I beg of them to guard that knowledge; for though he has now gone to Italy to live, and has given me permission to record the exploits of which he was the unique central character, he has very emphatically imposed his anonymity upon me; and I should not like to feel that, through any lack of discretion or delicacy, I have been the cause of his secret becoming generally known.
The present chronicle has to do with Vance’s solution of the notorious Benson murder which, due to the unexpectedness of the crime, the prominence of the persons involved, and the startling evidence adduced, was invested with an interest rarely surpassed in the annals of New York’s criminal history.
This sensational case was the first of many in which Vance figured as a kind of amicus curiæ in Markham’s investigations.
S. S. VAN DINE.
New York.
Characters of the Book
Philo Vance
John F.-X. Markham
District Attorney of New York County.
Alvin H. Benson
Well known Wall Street broker and man-about-town,
who was mysteriously murdered in his home.
Major Anthony Benson
Brother of the murdered man.
Mrs. Anna Platz
Housekeeper for Alvin Benson.
Muriel St. Clair
A young singer.
Captain Philip Leacock
Miss St. Clair’s fiancé.
Leander Pfyfe
Intimate friend of Alvin Benson’s.
Mrs. Paula Banning
A friend of Leander Pfyfe’s.
Elsie Hoffman
Secretary of the firm of Benson and Benson.
Colonel Bigsby Ostrander
A
retired army officer.
William H. Moriarty
An alderman, Borough of the Bronx.
Jack Prisco
Elevator-boy at the Chatham Arms.
George G. Stitt
Of the firm of Stitt and McCoy, Public Accountants.
Maurice Dinwiddie
Assistant District Attorney.
Chief Inspector O’Brien
Of the Police Department of New York City.
William M. Moran
Commanding Officer of the Detective Bureau.
Ernest Heath
Sergeant of the Homicide Bureau.
Burke
Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
Snitkin
Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
Emery
Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
Ben Hanlon
Commanding Officer of Detectives assigned to District
Attorney’s office.
Phelps
Detective assigned to District Attorney’s office.
Tracy
Detective assigned to District Attorney’s office.
Springer
Detective assigned to District Attorney’s office.
Higginbotham
Detective assigned to District Attorney’s office.
Captain Carl Hagedorn
Fire-arms expert.
Dr. Doremus
Medical Examiner.
Francis Swacker
Secretary to the District Attorney.
Currie
Vance’s valet.
CHAPTER I
Philo Vance at Home
(Friday, June 14;3 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’s4 collection of Cézanne watercolors at the Kessler Galleries,5 and having seen several pictures he particularly wanted, he had invited me to an early breakfast to give me instructions regarding their purchase.
A word concerning my relationship with Vance is necessary to clarify my rôle of narrator in this chronicle. The legal tradition is deeply imbedded in my family, and when my preparatory-school days were over, I was sent, almost as a matter of course, to Harvard to study law. It was there I met Vance, a reserved, cynical and caustic freshman who was the bane of his professors and the fear of his fellowclassmen. Why he should have chosen me, of all the students at the University, for his extra-scholastic association, I have never been able to understand fully. My own liking for Vance was simply explained: he fascinated and interested me, and supplied me with a novel kind of intellectual diversion. In his liking for me, however, no such basis of appeal was present. I was (and am now) a commonplace fellow, possessed of a conservative and rather conventional mind. But, at least, my mentality was not rigid, and the ponderosity of the legal procedure did not impress me greatly—which is why, no doubt, I had little taste for my inherited profession—; and it is possible that these traits found certain affinities in Vance’s unconscious mind. There is, to be sure, the less consoling explanation that I appealed to Vance as a kind of foil, or anchorage, and that he sensed in my nature a complementary antithesis to his own. But whatever the explanation, we were much together; and, as the years went by, that association ripened into an inseparable friendship.
Upon graduation I entered my father’s law firm—Van Dine and Davis—and after five years of dull apprenticeship I was taken into the firm as the junior partner. At present I am the second Van Dine of Van Dine, Davis and Van Dine, with offices at 120 Broadway. At about the time my name first appeared on the letterheads of the firm, Vance returned from Europe, where he had been living during my legal novitiate, and, an aunt of his having died and made him her principal beneficiary, I was called upon to discharge the technical obligations involved in putting him in possession of his inherited property.
This work was the beginning of a new and somewhat unusual relationship between us. Vance had a strong distaste for any kind of business transaction, and in time I became the custodian of all his monetary interests and his agent at large. I found that his affairs were various enough to occupy as much of my time as I cared to give to legal matters, and as Vance was able to indulge the luxury of having a personal legal factotum, so to speak, I permanently closed my desk at the office, and devoted myself exclusively to his needs and whims.
If, up to the time when Vance summoned me to discuss the purchase of the Cézannes, I had harbored any secret or repressed regrets for having deprived the firm of Van Dine, Davis and Van Dine of my modest legal talents, they were permanently banished on that eventful morning; for, beginning with the notorious Benson murder, and extending over a period of nearly four years, it was my privilege to be a spectator of what I believe was the most amazing series of criminal cases that ever passed before the eyes of a young lawyer. Indeed, the grim dramas I witnessed during that period constitute one of the most astonishing secret documents in the police history of this country.
Of these dramas Vance was the central character. By an analytical and interpretative process which, as far as I know, has never before been applied to criminal activities, he succeeded in solving many of the important crimes on which both the police and the District Attorney’s office had hopelessly fallen down.
Due to my peculiar relations with Vance it happened that not only did I participate in all the cases with which he was connected, but I was also present at most of the informal discussions concerning them which took place between him and the District Attorney; and, being of methodical temperament, I kept a fairly complete record of them.6 In addition, I noted down (as accurately as memory permitted) Vance’s unique psychological methods of determining guilt, as he explained them from time to time. It is fortunate that I performed this gratuitous labor of accumulation and transcription, for now that circumstances have unexpectedly rendered possible my making the cases public, I am able to present them in full detail and with all their various sidelights and succeeding steps—a task that would be impossible were it not for my numerous clippings and adversaria.7
Fortunately, too, the first case to draw Vance into its ramifications was that of Alvin Benson’s murder. Not only did it prove one of the most famous of New York’s causes célèbres, but it gave Vance an excellent opportunity of displaying his rare talents of deductive reasoning, and, by its nature and magnitude, aroused his interest in a branch of activity which heretofore had been alien to his temperamental promptings and habitual predilections.
The case intruded upon Vance’s life suddenly and unexpectedly, although he himself had, by a casual request made to the District Attorney over a month before, been the involuntary agent of this destruction of his normal routine. The thing, in fact, burst upon us before we had quite finished our breakfast on that mid-June morning, and put an end temporarily to all business connected with the purchase of the Cézanne paintings. When, later in the day, I visited the Kessler Galleries, two of the water-colors that Vance had particularly desired had been sold; and I am convinced that, despite his success in the unravelling of the Benson murder mystery and his saving of at least one innocent person from arrest, he has never to this day felt entirely compensated for the loss of those two little sketches on which he had set his heart.
As I was ushered into the living-room that morning by Currie, a rare old English servant who acted as Vance’s butler, valet, major-domo and, on occasions, specialty cook, Vance was sitting in a large armchair, attired in a surah silk dressing-gown and grey suède slippers, with V
ollard’s book on Cézanne open across his knees.
“Forgive my not rising, Van,” he greeted me casually. “I have the whole weight of the modern evolution in art resting on my legs. Furthermore, this plebeian early rising fatigues me, y’ know.”
He riffled the pages of the volume, pausing here and there at a reproduction.
“This chap Vollard,” he remarked at length, “has been rather liberal with our art-fearing country. He has sent a really goodish collection of his Cézannes here. I viewed ’em yesterday with the proper reverence and, I might add, unconcern, for Kessler was watching me; and I’ve marked the ones I want you to buy for me as soon as the Gallery opens this morning.”
He handed me a small catalogue he had been using as a book-mark.
“A beastly assignment, I know,” he added, with an indolent smile. “These delicate little smudges with all their blank paper will prob’bly be meaningless to your legal mind—they’re so unlike a neatly-typed brief, don’t y’ know. And you’ll no doubt think some of ’em are hung upside-down,—one of ’em is, in fact, and even Kessler doesn’t know it. But don’t fret, Van old dear. They’re very beautiful and valuable little knickknacks, and rather inexpensive when one considers what they’ll be bringing in a few years. Really an excellent investment for some money-loving soul, y’ know—inf’nitely better than that Lawyer’s Equity Stock8 over which you grew so eloquent at the time of my dear Aunt Agatha’s death.”*
Vance’s one passion (if a purely intellectual enthusiasm may be called a passion) was art—not art in its narrow, personal aspects, but in its broader, more universal significance. And art was not only his dominating interest, but his chief diversion. He was something of an authority on Japanese and Chinese prints; he knew tapestries and ceramics; and once I heard him give an impromptu causerie9 to a few guests on Tanagra figurines,10 which, had it been transcribed, would have made a most delightful and instructive monograph.
Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s Page 33
