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A couple of
preliminary matters. First, there are several related words I’ll be using,
and you may be distracted because you think I’m pronouncing them wrong. The
words have to do with a method of strangulation that usually involves
putting a wire or a rope around someone’s neck from behind and pulling on
it. Now, the dictionary gives three acceptable pronunciations, in this
order of preference: gah-ROTE, gah-RAHT, and GARE-ut. That’s for both the
noun, referring to the wire or rope itself, and the verb, referring to the
act of using it. Then there are also gah-ROTE-ing, gah-RAHT-ing, and GARE-ut-ing,
and gah-ROTE-er, gah-RAHT-er, and GARE-ut-er, and so on. I checked two
older dictionaries and a newer one, and the third pronunciation—GARE-ut,
and so on—was only in the newer one. So it’s apparently only become
widespread recently. That’s the way I said it, but since gah-ROTE and its
derivatives are preferred, those are the ones I’ll use.
Second: the
title of my talk. When Bob Robinson asked me to give it, he mentioned that
there is an old Philo Vance novel by S. S. Van Dine titled The Greene
Murder Case—although there it’s spelled with an e on the end,
like Greene Street in Columbia, whereas the Green I’ll be dealing with is
spelled without the e, like the color. I also put the question mark
in parentheses after the word murder because, as you’ll see, it
isn’t totally clear whether murder was involved. Anyway, as you probably
know, since you’re all mystery aficionados, S. S. Van Dine, whose real name
was Willard Huntington Wright, wrote a series of novels about Philo Vance,
who was sort of an American Sherlock Holmes who lived in New York in the
1920s. I read one of the novels when I was a kid–my parents had it lying
around the house–I think it might have been The Canary Murder Case,
but I’m not sure. The only thing that has stuck with me all these years
about the book is Philo Vance’s snooty way of expressing himself, and that
is based on the one line that I remember, or think I remember, from the
novel: Philo Vance is questioning somebody, and the person says he’ll have
to rack his brains to come up with the answer, and Vance says, “Well, then,
drum on your old encephalon.”
Anyway, to
put off actually starting to work on this paper, I went on the Internet and
Googled “Philo Vance.” One of the things that came up was a Web site called
The Mysterious Home Page, where I found a review of the Vance books by
Grobius Shortling. I kind of got a kick out of what he said, and I thought
I’d share it with you. After quoting a few lines of dialogue from The
Benson Murder Case that are similar to the “Drum on your old
encephalon” one, Shortling says:
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With this pretentious claptrap, Philo Vance
burst into the American mystery scene in 1926. S. S. Van Dine (W. H.
Wright) (1888-1939) was an art critic and a fascistic snob. . . .
However, he was a very intelligent and cultured man, no way as stupid as
his characters were. He compiled a classic
anthology of detective stories under his real name. The “dotty logic”
of the plots and the hero’s immense erudition about any subject
conveniently relevant to the plot of any particular book (Impressionists,
Egyptian antiquities, Scotch, er Scottish, terriers, tropical fish,
etc.), according to Julian Symons, does not detract from his ranking in
the Golden Age. Absurd as these books are, they are very readable as
“historical novels” in the sense that they reflect a milieu that has
totally vanished, if it ever existed at all, in New York City. In that
sense, they are as good as old Batman comic books and Doc Savage
potboilers and a lot of fun if you don’t mind slogging through elaborate
footnotes about Vance’s cephalic indices and the like. . . .
In spite of the pomposity of the diction and style,
these books, at least the earlier ones, are very well written, with some
amusing dialogue. . . . The narrator is the invisible S. S. Van Dine
himself, who is present in every scene but never says a word, making him
almost a perfect Watson because he is just dumb, period. That, and the
tolerance of the Law in putting up with Vance—not to mention their
incompetence—helps turn these
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