Search results for ""author s.s. van dine""

Like The Gracie Allen Murder Case before it, Winter was first written as a screenplay, in this case a vehicle for the figure skater Sonja Henie. However, while Allen’s scatterbrained persona made a charming foil for Philo’s stuffed-shirt pretensions, Ms. Henie provided no such inspiration. Van Dine did not live long enough to see her outed as a Nazi supporter, but her ice-princess act offered less for Philo to play against. It should be noted that Winter was published posthumously to close out the series, and though it went to press without Van Dine’s usual repeated revisions, it is true vintage Philo—utterly distinctive in style and its own very genuine kind of pleasure.

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Gracie Allen breaks the Philo Phormula in a number of ways. First is its title: this is the only book in the series to modify “Murder Case” with more than one word, much less with the name of a character. And then there’s that character: Gracie Allen was a very real, much-loved comedienne in the 1930s, famous for her double act with George Burns, and in fact the plot revolves around her. Gracie’s centrality is no accident: Van Dine wrote the story as a vehicle for Allen, and actually created the novel only after the film had come out. So do all these departures pay off? We’d be lying if we said that Gracie hits every single mark, but Van Dine does a surprisingly entertaining job of translating Ms. Allen’s delicious Ditzy Blonde persona to the page, and she makes a charming foil for Philo’s evergreen erudition.

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The pocket-sized FLAME TREE COLLECTABLE CRIME CLASSICS are chosen to create a delightful and timeless gift library of classic crime and mystery thrillers. Each stunning unabridged edition features deluxe cover treatments, ribbon markers, luxury endpapers and gilded edges. The first best-selling title in S.S. Van Dine’s series of Philo Vance detective mysteries, The Benson Murder Case (1926), was inspired by the real-life unsolved murder of Joseph Bowne Elwell (1873–1920) in which the victim was shot from within his locked house. Intellectual dandy and amateur sleuth Vance – ‘a man of unusual culture and brilliance’ – finds the case of murdered playboy stockbroker Alvin Benson fascinating, the missing toupee and false teeth being especially curious… Vance kindly comes to the aid of his friend District Attorney Markham and sets about tracking down the killer using his cerebral powers of deduction in contrast to the short-sighted methods of the police. A specially commissioned biography of the author and a glossary of Victorian and Literary terms make this new edition essential for all classic crime fans!

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