: The Canary murder case by Van Dine S S - Detective and mystery stories; Murder Investigation Fiction; Vance Philo (Fictitious character) Fiction; Private investigators New York (State) New York Fiction

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First appearances deceive many: the intelligence alone perceives what has been carefully hidden in the recesses of the mind. --Phaedrus.

Introductory

Due to my peculiar relations with Vance it happened that not only did I participate in all the cases with which he was connected, but I was also present at most of the informal discussions concerning them which took place between him and the District Attorney; and, being of methodical temperament, I kept a complete record of them. It is fortunate that I performed this gratuitous labor of accumulation and transcription, for now that circumstances have rendered possible my making the cases public, I am able to present them in full detail and with all their various sidelights and succeeding steps.

In another volume--"The Benson Murder Case"--I have related how Vance happened to become involved in criminal investigation, and have also set forth the unique analytic methods of crime detection by which he solved the problem of Alvin Benson's mysterious murder.

S. S. Van Dine.

New York.

Characters of the Book

The "Canary"

Here, in a few commonplace words, is the bleak, unadorned statement of one of the most astonishing crimes in the police annals of this country--a crime so contradictory, so baffling, so ingenious, so unique, that for many days the best minds of the Police Department and the District Attorney's office were completely at a loss as to even a method of approach. Each line of investigation only tended to prove that Margaret Odell could not possibly have been murdered. And yet, huddled on the great silken davenport in her living-room lay the girl's strangled body, giving the lie to so grotesque a conclusion.

Her notoriety was due in part to certain legendary tales of her affairs with one or two obscure potentates in the backwashes of Europe. She had spent two years abroad after her first success in "The Bretonne Maid"--a popular musical comedy in which she had been mysteriously raised from obscurity to the rank of "star"--and, one may cynically imagine, her press-agent took full advantage of her absence to circulate vermilion tales of her conquests.

She had quitted the "Follies" at the close of the season, and during her subsequent spectacular career in the haunts of Broadway's night life she had been popularly and familiarly called the Canary. Thus it happened that when her dead body was found, brutally strangled, in her apartment, the crime immediately became known, and was always thereafter referred to, as the Canary murder.

This man was a young social aristocrat, whom, for purposes of anonymity, I have chosen to call Philo Vance.

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