6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Van Dine's Out of Style, But A Great Read, Nonetheless, January 22, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: The Dragon Murder Case (Hardcover)
I imagine that many people avoid these marvelous Philo Vance mysteries because of the snooty tone and the slightly precious self-image of the amateur detective hero. What can I say? I think they're hilarious. Vance approaches each crime as a work of art -- and Van Dine always has him stop to examine a rare art object during the investigation to remind of us this -- in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes, and each novel brings Vance face-to-face with teh herd in a manner contrived to show him at his worst -- or is it his best? Whichever one it is, it's always a gas. This particular Vance novel is not my favorite -- I like the nihilistic insanity of "The Bishop Murder Case" the best -- but it's near the top. Wish they'd come back out in paperback, though, because this beautiful facsimile is a little hard on the bank account.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Classic puzzle mystery featuring one of the greatest (and certainly most annoying) of all fictional detectives., July 16, 2008
This review is from: The Dragon Murder Case (Hardcover)
"The Dragon Murder Case" is the seventh of the twelve Philo Vance mystery novels written by Willard Huntington Wright under the name "S. S. van Dine." The series began in 1926 with "The Benson Murder Case" and ended in 1939 with the posthumous publication of "The Winter Murder Case." As one might suppose, all the books deal with murders committed under the most puzzling circumstances, only to be unraveled in the end by the ultra-rich, ultra-effete, ultra-snobbish and unquestionably ultra-clever Philo Vance.
The books appeared on very nearly an annual basis and all of them were financially successful, although some critics professed to detect a falling off of quality in the second half dozen--beginning with this very volume. The books were spun off into a successful series of movies and radio shows. The producers of Vance in other media, being no fools, took care to drop many of his more obnoxious ticks, making Vance a much more appealing character on the screen and on the speaker. The book-buying public, on the other hand, took their annual dose of Vance unadulterated and liked him that way.
In the earlier books of the series Wright/van Dine stated plainly that all of Vance's cases had taken place during the four years in which his friend, John F.-X. Markham, had served his single term as District Attorney of New York. Elsewhere, in my review of "The Benson Murder Case," I gave my reasons for believing that the four years in question were 1920-1924. By the time that Wright/van Dine got around to "The Dragon Murder Case," he had stopped referring to that very narrow time-frame. It is difficult from internal evidence to determine whether this book was intended to be set about 1922 or, as I suspect more likely, in 1933.
Both the author and Vance were essentially urban creatures and ten of the twelve books are unambiguously set in the New York City of three-quarters of a century ago. This book, however, is set in an Americanized version of an English country estate and stately home. The mix of characters, too, although they are all Americans, is exactly the mix that might be expected in an English country home mystery novel. Inspector Alleyn, Miss Marple and Albert Campion would all feel right at home. Wright/van Dine being, in Vance's words, the sort of chap he was, don't y'know, plonked this Yankee-ized stately home down entirely within the limits of urban Manhattan, apparently for no better reason than that he could.
"The Dragon Murder Case" differs from the second of the series, "The Canary Murder Case" in that the "canary" in the title of the earlier book refers to an up-and-coming young female singer, while the "dragon" is ... well, a dragon, sort of. One of the regular features of a Vance novel was a chapter (and sometimes more) in which the erudite sleuth offered what amounted to an information dump on some recondite subject or other. In this book, the information being dumped relates to dragons--Amerindian dragons, Indian sub-continental dragons, Hebrew dragons, Sumerian dragons, Chinese dragons, classical Greek dragons, Germanic dragons and every other d----d kind of dragon you can imagine.
(Another regular feature of the books, an unintended one, I think, is that Vance's scholarship is of an amusingly slipshod and shallow nature. All his collection of dragons are dragons only because Vance calls them so. To anyone with a little independent knowledge of the field, it is clear that Vance is tossing all kinds of miscellaneous monsters into his literary pot, monsters that in some cases shared no characteristic save non-human form.)
This mystery deals in a perfectly scrupulous basis--for this is a "classic" mystery, after all--with the puzzle of how a man visiting a home for a weekend party can dive into a swimming pool in plain sight of five or six people, disappear under the water and then utterly vanish, leaving behind no signs of exiting the pool and no body at its bottom when the pool is drained. By analogy with the standard "locked room mystery," you might call this one a "locked swimming pool mystery."
The puzzle is sound enough, although hardly one of the great ones of mystery lore, but the handling is relatively weak, at least by the standards set for Vance in the first six books. Everyone in the book is just too willing to get sidetracked onto the subject of dragons, even when observing the perfectly plain physical evidence revealed by the draining of the pool. It all seems more than a little forced.
Cavils aside, "The Dragon Murder Case" remains one of a precious series of books about the most thoroughly annoying sleuth in all of detective literature, bless his exasperating, effete, snobbish heart.
Four stars--but only relative to the rest of the Vance series. Five stars in comparison to most things being written today.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Vance Can't Dance, July 12, 2002
This review is from: The Dragon Murder Case (Hardcover)
Philo Vance is certainly as insufferable as advertised; the other characters are purely functional: they are here to marvel at his astounding genius; to fume at his irascibility and be confounded by his unerring instincts, and, of course, to fill the pages with plausible suspects for the crime du jour. The humor is so dry you're not sure if it's really there. This one never quite catches fire, but it's never quite draggin', either (hee, hee). It's wittily written and entertaining enough, and boy, did they do dustjackets right in those days! Thanks again to Otto Penzler for a beautiful edition in this series of facsimile-firsts, which richly deserves to be continued.
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