THE GREENE MURDER CASE

The year 1928 finds dilettante Philo Vance rousing himself from his fascination with antiquities, music, and obscure languages to ask who’s decimating the family left behind by wealthy Tobias Greene’s imperious will.

When Tobias died 12 years ago, he divided his estate equally among his wife and five children with one notable exception: Anyone except his adopted youngest daughter, Ada, would be disinherited if they left the family manse before 1932. The news that his eldest daughter, Julia, has been shot to death, presumably by her brother Chester’s missing revolver, is the first indication that the Greene home has turned into a death trap. Since the paraplegic Mrs. Greene and siblings Chester, Rex, and Sibella all act as snobbishly entitled in their different ways as Vance, who joins D.A. John F.-X. Markham in an attempt to catch the killer before the house is left vacant, it’s no big deal to watch them get picked off to the accompaniment of Vance’s oracular announcements that there’s something very, very wrong about the Greene home and its tenants. None of the characters’ motives or behavior is any more believable than the logistics of the individual crimes, but in some ways that’s exactly the escapist point. Casual fans will identify the killer early on, but only serious devotees of real-life criminologist Hans Gross will realize that the murderer has borrowed impossible murder methods from Gross’ encyclopedia of real-life criminal cases, which the denouement quotes at amusing length, as sedulously as if following recipes from The Joy of Killing.

For better or worse, this third of Van Dine’s deliriously dated 12 detective novels is Philo Vance’s ultimate case.