The Benson Murder Case
A. L. Burt Company
PublishersNew York
Published by arrangement with Charles Scribner's Sons
Printed in U. S. A.
Charles Scribner's Sons
Printed in the United States of America
It gives us considerable pleasure to be able to offer to the public the "inside" record of those of former District Attorney Markham's criminal cases in which Mr. Philo Vance figured so effectively. The true inwardness of these famous cases has never before been revealed; for Mr. S. S. Van Dine, Mr. Vance's lawyer and almost constant companion, being the only person who possessed a complete record of the facts, has only recently been permitted to make them public.
After inspecting Mr. Van Dine's voluminous notes, we decided to publish "The Benson Murder Case" as the first of the series—not because it was the most interesting and startling, nor yet the most complicated and dramatic from the fictional point of view, but because, coming first chronologically, it explains how Mr. Philo Vance happened to become involved in criminal matters, and also because it possesses certain features that reveal very clearly Mr. Vance's unique analytic methods of crime detection.
If you will refer to the municipal statistics of the City of New York, you will find that the number of unsolved major crimes during the four years that John F.-X. Markham was District Attorney, was far smaller than under any of his predecessors' administrations. Markham projected the District Attorney's office into all manner of criminal investigations; and, as a result, many abstruse crimes on which the Police had hopelessly gone aground, were eventually disposed of.
But although he was personally credited with the many important indictments and subsequent convictions that he secured, the truth is that he was only an instrument in many of his most famous cases. The man who actually solved them and supplied the evidence for their prosecution, was in no way connected with the city's administration, and never once came into the public eye.
At that time I happened to be both legal advisor and personal friend of this other man; and it was thus that the strange and amazing facts of the situation became known to me. But not until recently have I been at liberty to make them public. Even now I am not permitted to divulge the man's name, and, for that reason, I have chosen, arbitrarily, to refer to him throughout these ex-officio reports as Philo Vance.
It is, of course, possible that some of his acquaintances may, through my revelations, be able to guess his identity; and if such should prove the case, I beg of them to guard that knowledge; for though he has now gone to Italy to live, and has given me permission to record the exploits of which he was the unique central character, he has very emphatically imposed his anonymity upon me; and I should not like to feel that, through any lack of discretion or delicacy, I have been the cause of his secret becoming generally known.
The present chronicle has to do with Vance's solution of the notorious Benson murder which, due to the unexpectedness of the crime, the prominence of the persons involved, and the startling evidence adduced, was invested with an interest rarely surpassed in the annals of New York's criminal history.
This sensational case was the first of many in which Vance figured as a kind of amicus curiæ in Markham's investigations.
New York.
Contents
| Chapter | Page | |
| Characters of the Book | xi | |
| I. | Philo Vance at Home | 1 |
| II. | At the Scene of the Crime | 15 |
| III. | A Lady's Hand-bag | 32 |
| IV. | The Housekeeper's Story | 46 |
| V. | Gathering Information | 60 |
| VI. | Vance Offers an Opinion | 72 |
| VII. | Reports and an Interview | 86 |
| VIII. | Vance Accepts a Challenge | 104 |
| IX. | The Height of the Murderer | 118 |
| X. | Eliminating a Suspect | 131 |
| XI. | A Motive and a Threat | 143 |
| XII. | The Owner of a Colt-.45 | 157 |
| XIII. | The Grey Cadillac | 168 |
| XIV. | Links in the Chain | 179 |
| XV. | "Pfyfe—Personal" | 189 |
| XVI. | Admissions and Suppressions | 203 |
| XVII. | The Forged Check | 218 |
| XVIII. | A Confession | 231 |
| XIX. | Vance Cross-examines | 243 |
| XX. | A Lady Explains | 258 |
| XXI. | Sartorial Revelations | 270 |
| XXII. | Vance Outlines a Theory | 284 |
| XXIII. | Checking an Alibi | 302 |
| XXIV. | The Arrest | 320 |
| XXV. | Vance Explains His Methods | 336 |
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published in 1926, before the cutoff of January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1939, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 84 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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