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Anybody who doesn’t is regarded as
eccentric and therefore a potential suspect. All men wore hats and most
had mustaches (never beards). All women, except floozies, had bobbed
haircuts. I think, also, that Van Dine invented the stereotypical jaunty,
sarcastic medical examiner (Doc Doremus in this series) who always
complains about missing his lunch, golf, whatever, like Max in the
Inspector Morse books, and will never commit to a definite time of death.
The dumb cop (Sgt. Heath), who just
wants to arrest everybody and work them over with a rubber hose, however,
dates back to Inspector Lestrade, but in an American way–English cops
were more polite, but just as stupid, in these Golden Age days.
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And about The Greene
Murder Case itself he says:
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A good author does not . . . kill off every
possible suspect except for one or two so that the murderer is revealed
by elimination. . . . Philo Vance stays up all night trying to
rationalize this case, when there are only two possible suspects left,
one of them out of the picture by being in Atlantic City! This might have
been a good story if the author had included a larger range of suspects
in the household and not made it impossible for any outsiders to be
involved. The only other possible suspect would be the butler, and Van
Dine knew he couldn’t get away with that. (Logically, however, even by
Vance’s screwy reasoning, the butler COULD have done it, and by the
parameters is most ABLE to have done it, and should have been written up
as more of a suspect motivewise–also the other servants–except Van Dine’s
murderers were never of the lower class.)
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More
Internet research turned up the information that William Powell played
Philo Vance in four movies between 1929 and 1933: The Greene Murder
Case, The Canary Murder Case, The Benson Murder Case, and The Kennel
Murder Case. In 1930, the same year that The Benson Murder Case
came out, Basil Rathbone played Vance in The Bishop Murder Case—nine
years before he played Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles.
Vance has also been played in the movies and on TV by James Stephenson,
William Wright, Alan Curtis, Warren William, Grant Richards, Paul Lukas,
Wilfrid Hyde-White, Edmund Lowe, Giorgio Albertazzi, and the ever-popular Jirí
Dvorák.
Now,
down to business.
The Times
of London called Richard Lancelyn Green “the world’s foremost authority” on
Sherlock Holmes. Now, I think that title rightfully belongs to me, but
Green did have some pretty good credentials. His father, Roger Lancelyn
Green, edited the Sherlock Holmes Journal from 1957 to 1979 and
published several of his own articles in it. Richard Lancelyn Green was
born in 1953 and grew up near Liverpool in an old house called Poulton
Hall. When he was eleven, he discovered the Sherlock Holmes books in his
father’s library and immediately got hooked. He read all the stories, then
read them all again, and began to pattern himself after Holmes. He trained
his powers of observation and memorized Holmes’s rules, such as “It is a
capital mistake to theorize before one has data,” “never trust to general
impressions, but concentrate yourself upon details,” and “there is nothing
more deceptive than an obvious fact.” When he was twelve, he became the
youngest person ever inducted into the Sherlock Holmes Society of London.
When he was thirteen, he created a replica of Holmes’s sitting room in the
attic of Poulton Hall using items he had bought at local junk sales: it had
a rack of pipes, a Persian slipper filled with tobacco, a stack of unpaid
bills pinned to the mantle with a jackknife, a box of pills labeled
“Poison,” a preserved snake, a brass microscope, an invitation to the
Gasfitters’ Ball, and empty ammunition cartridges. One wall had bullet
holes in the shape of a patriotic “V.R.”; but they were painted on, because
he didn’t think the attic would stand up to real bullets. On the door of
the room, which was reached by climbing seventeen stairs—I don’t know how
he arranged that; it must have been a lucky coincidence—he hung a sign that
said “Baker Street.” A tape recording played the sounds of carriage wheels
and hoof beats on cobblestones. Holmes fans came from all over England to
see the room. After he graduated from Oxford in 1975, Green settled in the
Kensington borough of London—where Dr. Watson once lived—and widened his
interests to include not just Sherlock Holmes but Arthur Conan Doyle
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