The Greene Murder Case

By S. S. Van Dine

This early work by S. S. Van Dine was originally published in 1928 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. 'The Greene Murder Case' is one of Van Dine's novels of crime and mystery. S. S. Van Dine was born Willard Huntington Wright in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1888. He attended St. Vincent College, Pomona College and Harvard University, but failed to graduate, leaving to cultivate contacts he had made in the literary world. At the age of twenty-one, Wright began his professional writing career as literary editor of the Los Angeles Times. In 1926, Wright published his first S. S. Van Dine novel, The Benson Murder Case. Wright went on to write eleven more mysteries. The first few books about his upper-class amateur sleuth, Philo Vance, were so popular that Wright became wealthy for the first time in his life. His later books declined in popularity as the reading public's tastes in mystery fiction changed, but during the late twenties and early thirties his work was very successful.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Jan 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781473379862

S. S. Van Dine

S. S. Van Dine was the pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright (1888 - 1939), a US art critic and prolific author. After a long illness, he started writing detective fiction under a pseudonym, creating the wildly popular detective Philo Vance whose obscure cultural references and knowledge of aesthetic arts helped him solve many complicated puzzle plots.

Reviews for The Greene Murder Case

[antiquary_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

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

[mmyoung_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Very disappointing. Van Dine's Philo Vance books were financially successful and influenced a number of other mystery writers not least of whom was Ellery Queen. The first two books in the Vance series were rather stiff and self-aware but that is not surprising. This book, the third, lacks any good excuse for its shortcomings. SPOILER WARNING:The only reason the first murder was not committed within hours of its taking place was due to the fact the police did almost nothing. The simplest aspects of police routine were not carried out. It wasn't a difficult to solve crime it was a crime that should have been solved before the next dawn. Most of the book is smoke and magic to make us think that Vance is clever detective. Vance and the police basically do nothing until the viable suspects are down to 2 and then when they make a move of these two tries to kill the other. No deductions necessary at all. The writer loses additional points for going out of his way in his attempts to demonstrate the Vance is extraordinarily well educated and then misuses words that should be part of any decently educated person's vocabulary.The greatest mystery of this series, to me, is that it was successful and influential.

[ericcostello-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

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.)