I won’t lie: I haven’t quite finished SS Van Dine’s The Bishop Murder Case. I nearly have. Investigator Philo Vance is, I believe, about to expound a theory which will, no doubt, be proven correct. My initially chosen murderer has, I think, been knocked out of the running. Hey ho. Despite what Golden Age detective fiction writers believed, I do not generally treat murder mysteries as a sort of cross-word puzzle with which to tease my little grey cells.

No. I pick a likely suspect and then am pleasantly surprised to be right or, more often, pleasantly surprised by the actual answer. Either way doesn’t much matter to me, as long as I enjoy the laying out of the problem and the steps by which the detective investigates and then explains.

But back to Van Dine, and his detective, Philo Vance.

I’ve not read any SS Van Dine novels before, though I have read his Rules for Detective Fiction. It was part of my MA; I was busy rereading Agatha Christie (and avoiding Edgar Allen Poe) instead.

Vance, however, I like. He reminds me somewhat of Dorothy L Sayers’ Peter Wimsey, only American. A similar way of speaking, perhaps. The classical background, maybe. Wimsey is a bibliophile, given to quotation; Vance is trying to translate Egyptian papyrii when he’s called on to help investigate, and seems to have a vast quantity of random knowledge. Including a quite in-depth understanding of something highly mathematical. Or was it astrophysics? It was something of either nature. There are lots of mathematicians in the puzzle. And chess-players. Van Dine was definitely leaning into the Murder Mystery As Puzzle For Reader idea.

He also used Mother Goose rhymes for the murders in the case, starting with Who Killed Cock Robin? Victim, one J. Cochrane Robin, found with an arrow through the chest. Christie used nursery rhymes for several of her novels too.
Who knew the rhymes we sing our children could be so murderous?

I am enjoying The Bishop Murder Case, and wouldn’t disdain to read more SS Van Dine. But, once finished, I must return to my actual reading challenge and stop leapfrogging with library books. After that cosy fantasy one I got at the same time as Van Dine, I mean. Library deadlines and all that.