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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
I've read them all (and was delighted when "The Greene Murder Case" finally arrived to complete the set.)
They're an acquired taste -- period pieces don't work for everyone. Vance reminds me a bit of Sherlock Holmes though with a different skill set and a broader range, and the narrator is his Watson. Vance prevails because he knows everything (or at least, a great deal more than those around him.) His omniscience can be a bit wearing (Let's see: he speaks, reads and write how many languages? He's expert in how many topics? Oh, he's skilled in Jiu Jitsu? What doesn't he do?), but overall, they are classic mysteries and well worth the read.
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Dennis
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oh, i agree, he's completely over the top. in some ways i find the Philo Vance books (and Vance himself even more so) to be like a very well done parody of "classic" detective novels in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes (with Van Dine of course being his Watson). that is part of where the humour comes from. i mean, even leaving aside the personality and diverse talents and expertise of Vance, what about those outrageous footnotes !! some of them are several paragraphs long, and half of them are only tangentially relevant to the story, if that much. this one is from the Scarab Murder Case :
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* The daughter of this particular Pharaoh--Nefra--incidentally is the titular heroine of H. Rider Haggard's romance, "Queen of the Dawn." Haggard, following the chronology of H. R. Hall, placed Intef in the Fourteenth Dynasty instead of the Seventeenth, making him a contemporary of the great Hyksos Pharaoh, Apopi, whose son Khyan--the hero of the book--marries Nefra. The researches of Bliss and Weigall seem to have demonstrated that this relationship is an anachronism.
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it's completely gratuitous ! no bearing on the story whatsoever !!! but Van Dine loves his footnotes... it reminds me of that sketch "would you like to hear an interesting fact ?"
i'm trying to remember what i read in a preface to one of the books (a long time ago...) i beleive he began writing them almost as an exercise of style, to prove that detective novels were a legitimate form of litterature (which was emphatically not the opinion of the literati of the day). he considered that there were strict rules which all detective stories should follow, and in a way he was writing archetypes more than he was writing stories.