The Canary Murder Case: A Philo Vance Story

x, 343 pp. Inspiration for the film starring Louise Brooks as 'The Canary.' The Canary Murder Case (1927) is a murder mystery novel which deals with the murders of a sexy nightclub singer and, eventually, her boyfriend, solved by Philo Vance. S.S. Van Dine's classic whodunnit, second in the Philo Vance series, is said by Howard Haycraft to have broken "all modern publishing records for detective fiction." The earliest editions give the title with quotation marks around the word 'Canary,' but most subsequent editions omit them. The beautiful Margaret Odell, famous Broadway beauty and ex-Follies girl known as 'The Canary' is found murdered in her apartment. She has a number of men in her life, ranging from high society to gangsters, and more than one man visited her apartment on the night she dies. It is Philo Vance's characteristic erudition that leads him to a key clue that allows him to penetrate a very clever alibi and reveal the killer. "The strangeness, the daring, the seeming impenetrability of the crime marked it as one of the most singular and astonishing cases in New York's police annals; and had it not been for Philo Vance's participation in its solution, I firmly believe it would have remained one of the great unsolved mysteries of this country." ABOUT THE AUTHOR: "S. S. Van Dine was the pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright (October 15, 1888 - April 11, 1939), a U.S art critic and author. He created the once immensely popular fictional detective Philo Vance, who first appeared in books in the 1920s, then in movies and on the radio."