Locked-room mysteries are having a moment, but Willard Huntington Wright (writing as S.S. Van Dine) was among those who got there first. Originally published in 1927, The "Canary" Murder Case stars a charismatic amateur sleuth who is both as smart as he thinks he is, and more pompous than he realizes.
The second Philo Vance mystery (after The Benson Murder Case) begins with the murder of Margaret Odell, a Broadway starlet whose strangled body is discovered one morning in her ground-floor Manhattan apartment. According to the building's night telephone operator, Odell had only one visitor the previous evening: her date. The operator saw the man emerge from Odell's unit; minutes later, both men heard her scream and then reassure them through her door that she was fine. There's only one door to Odell's apartment, and iron bars protect all the windows. As Vance puts it, "How, oh how, did the fair Margaret's executioner get in?" And why, oh why, was she killed?
Readers of The "Canary" Murder Case may be a step ahead of Vance on one point, but he's consistently two steps ahead of the district attorney, whose reverence for facts clashes with the sleuth's near fetishism of intuition. An independently wealthy American who retained the English accent he picked up abroad, Vance is ostentatiously erudite and reliably--if not always intentionally--amusing. A typical remark: "Recognition of my transcendent genius, I see, is destined to be posthumous." Readers just discovering this series may come to regard Vance as highly as he regards himself. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer