Fiendish and Baffling
Review of the Felony & Mayhem Press Kindle eBook edition (March 25, 2019) of the Charles Scribner’s hardcover original (March 24, 1928).

Vance held up his hand. "It’s all very simple, Sergeant—once you have the key. What misled us was the fiendish cleverness and audacity of the plot. But there’s no longer any need to speculate about it. I have a printed and bound explanation of everything that happened. And it’s not a fictional or speculative explanation."

I had a bad introduction to the Philo Vance series with The Benson Murder Case (Phil Vance #1 - 1926) when I bought, sight unseen, a supposed "Collectible Crime Classics" edition which I ended up reviewing as Microscopic Edition may require reading with a Magnifying Glass.

When this Felony & Mayhem Press eBook showed up as a Kindle Deal of the Day, I decided to take a chance and ended up being pleasantly surprised. This was terrific Golden Age of Crime type stuff with a set of rather unlikeable family characters being slowly picked off one by one, leaving the police completely baffled until unofficial detective Philo Vance explains it all in the end.

See cover at https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f4/SSVanDine_TheGreeneMurderCase.jpg
Front cover of the original Charles Scribner’s first edition (1928). Image sourced from Wikipedia.

The case is documented by Vance's regular Watson under the name of S.S. Van Dine which is the pseudonym used by Willard Huntington Wright when writing mysteries. This discovery was even more of a bonus after I had ended up being disappointed with some early Nero Wolfe mysteries recently. I think the Philo Vances will be a series worth pursuing, especially now that I see there are upcoming reissues under the American Mystery Classics imprint (see below).

On the Berengaria Ease of Solving Scale® I would rate this as a 9 out of 10, i.e. "a very difficult solve." Even though the list of suspects drops continuously through the murderer's efforts, Ebert's Law of the Economy of Characters doesn't help much towards the solution as there is also continual misdirection to muddy the waters.

Trivia and Links
This novel was adapted for film as The Greene Murder Case (1929) directed by Frank Tuttle and starring William Powell as Philo Vance in his second performance as the character. No trailer or full film seems to be available online. There was a 1937 remake retitled as Night of Mystery directed by Ewald Dupont and starring Grant Richards as Philo Vance, but no public copy of the latter film seems to exist (according to Wikipedia).

The Greene Murder Case will have a future release in the Otto Penzler American Mystery Classics series on June 4, 2024.
See cover at https://penzlerpublishers.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Green-Murder-Case-cover...
Front cover of the upcoming American Mystery Classics edition (2024). Image sourced from Penzler Publishers.

Willard Huntington Wright aka S.S. Van Dine is also the author of the Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories. ( )

Questo terzo volume dedicato alle investigazioni di Philo Vance per il momento è il mio preferito: si tratta di un vero e proprio thriller che ti tiene incollata alle pagine, con un’atmosfera molto cupa e inquietante. A un certo punto sembrerà quasi che ci sia una presenza nella casa dove vive la famiglia Greene, la personificazione della degenerazione dei rapporti familiari.

Decisamente non il romanzo che consiglierei di leggere in questi giorni di confinamento in casa, dove il nervosismo tra chi deve condividere gli stessi metri quadri accende con più facilità incomprensioni e litigi – o forse sì, se leggere un libro così cupo può aiutarvi a tirar fuori un po’ di sentimenti negativi. ( )

Philo Vance "solves" case by letting murderer kill all but one and almost doesn't save that one. Clever, not! This has to be one of the dopiest mysteries I have ever read. No wonder Ogden Nash said "Philo Vance needs a kick in the pance." The idea that the police would stand back and let a murder scene be searched only superficially is a little unbelievable.

Arguably the most successful of the Philo Vance novels, largely because van Dine quite successfully creates a poisonous setting; that of a decaying mansion on the East River in Manhattan, populated by a mother and five children that all hate each other. There is a fair ration of pseduo-scholarship that can tend to hold things up -- van Dine is addicted to inflicting the original German on us in spots, especially during the explication of the solution. I'm not sure I buy, 100%, Vance's solution to the crime. It's one of those amazing mechanical crimes you'd never see in real life. And the disposition of the criminal is disappointing (though probably not to the survivors). As I say. the best of the Philo Vance novels -- and some critics say the series goes straight down hill from here. Caveat lector. (NOTE: one of the other reviewers here makes a cogent point: there's very little actual detecting until many of the killings have taken place, and it's questionable whether the police did a good job in investigating the first murders. Fair points, both, but that goes more to mechanics rather than the stage-setting van Dine does.) ( )

Mrs, Greene is a wealthy widow who lives wth three daughters and two sons in an elaborate New York mansion until murder strikes. ( )