Overview

The sleuth we love to hate is back, as Philo Vance investigates the murder of a ""fast and easy showgirl"" known as the Canary. Let us begin by promising that no actual birds are harmed in this story. The Canary of the title is Margaret Odell, once a showgirl in the Ziegfeld Follies, more recently an occasional nightclub singer and professional good time. When she is murdered, there are any number of suspects, all of the male variety. The police, of course, are baffled-it was ever thus-but happily, Philo Vance is on the scene, ready to apply his brilliance, his erudition, his astonishingly nuanced grasp of human nature to the solving of the crime. British crime writer and critic Julian Symons once noted that ""It is difficult to grasp the extent of Van Dine's success,"" but a success he surely was: Canary stayed on bestseller lists for months and was filmed with William Powell and Louise Brooks. Will you cozy up to Philo Vance? Unlikely. But you'll have a dandy time.

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9781631943409

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Reviews

“The author mystifies the reader, more and more so as the book ingeniously progresses” —New York Times “A tale fine enough to serve as a model for writers of the Mystery story...never before have you read of a crime so baffling, so devilishly ingenious!...Genius has once more been turned loose in the field of detective fiction!” —Shawnee News-Star “The reader is gripped from the first page to the last” —Montclair Times “The author mystifies the reader, more and more so as the book ingeniously progresses” —New York Times “Lifted the detective story onto the plane of a fine art” —Bloody Murder

Author Information

S.S. Van Dine, pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright (1888–1939), was an American critic, editor, and the author of a series of best-selling detective novels featuring the brilliant but arrogant upper-class sleuth Philo Vance. All but two of the twelve Philo Vance mysteries were adapted as feature films, and his writings on the craft of detective fiction were also immensely popular.

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