Van Dine, SS - The Bishop Murder Case (1928)

The Bishop Murder Case is a mystery that grabs the reader by the lapels and drags them into the story, for it's hard to resist narrator Van's statement the matter "seemed too incredible and too wicked for acceptance by the normal mind of man".

Once again, Philo Vance aids DA John Markham and his police colleagues after Joseph Cochrane Robin is found dead, an arrow in his chest, in the private archery range behind retired professor Bertrand Dillard's New York house. Also residing in Dillard's house are his niece Belle and his protégé and adopted son, mathematical genius Sigurd Arnesson. The Drukkers, an over protective mother and her crippled son Adolph, live in the house whose rear yard adjoins the Dillard's. More than one person appears to know something useful even if they are not saying anything, and included among them are a neighbouring chess expert, John Pardee, and civil engineer Raymond Sperling, Robin's rival for Belle's hand.

The connection between the nursery rhyme relating how Cock Robin was killed and the murder is noticed even before messages signed by The Bishop, pointing this out, are sent to the press. Soon there is another death whose circumstances again echo a nursery rhyme, and that's only the start.

My verdict: An intriguing premise that will doubtless remind readers of Christie's A Pocket Full of Rye. Is Philo Vance right when he declares abnormal psychology is involved or is there some other reason for the crimes? The only way to find out is to read this serpentine entry in Van Dine's series, for more I cannot say without revealing too much.

Etext

Mary R

The Bishop Murder Case (1928) is admired by nearly everyone: but I have mixed feelings. Many people cite it as Van Dine's best book. I think it is strongest in its first nine chapters, which are full of outstanding ideas.

MILD SPOILERS:

It does seem to be the first mystery book built around a nursery rhyme. Many Golden Age novels are constructed around some formal scheme: Ellery Queen and Ngaio Marsh come to mind here. Marsh's chapter headings especially convey a fascinating sense of pure geometry. Even Agatha Christie used this approach in Ten Little Indians. Bishop seems to be not only the first nursery-rhyme mystery book, but the first of any sort of mystery novel constructed around a formal scheme. The nursery rhyme elements are strongest in the first two chapters.

Unlike some critics, I am unperturbed about the coincidence embodied in the nursery rhymes. They are presented by Van Dine as exactly that: coincidences. Various characters in the book point them out, then the mad killer takes advantage of them. Van Dine does not use them to cheat on his mystery puzzle. They make for some vivid storytelling.

Also well-done in Chapter 2: the architecture of the crime scene. This is a full three-dimensional cityscape, filled with interesting detail. A mathematician character calls this a "three-dimensional house". It certainly is. Like Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Album (1933), we can follow the architecture up and down, as well as horizontally both North-South and East-West. The next five chapters trace the movements of the characters around the crime scene.

Like several Van Dine books, Chapters 2-6 involve a howdunit: the actual method of murder is mysterious. This particular howdunit is of mixed quality: Van Dine is solid about planting clues at the crime scene, that can be used to deduce the mechanism of the crime. Unfortunately, the key idea had already been used by G.K. Chesterton in "The Arrow of Heaven" (1925). As in some other Van Dine works, the howdunit is solved early on: Vance gives a complete solution in these early chapters.

At the novel's end, we see that Van Dine has also embedded a couple of fair play clues pointing to the killer. They are hardly logically conclusive. But they are there: and contrary to the claims of some critics, The Bishop Murder Case is a fair play detective novel.

The Bishop Murder Case is one of the earliest serial killer novels, aside from stories based on Jack the Ripper.

The second murder is a surrealistic echo of the first. This is an important artistic strategy that will later run through Ellery Queen, and Craig Rice.

On the negative side, Vance playing the role of judge, jury and executioner at the end is wrong - an attack on democratic institutions and the rule of law.

The Bishop Murder Case has two backgrounds: archery and mathematical physics. There is what amounts to a mini-museum of archery in the mansion. Such private museums will play a role in later Van Dine and Van Dine school authors.

The references to mathematics and physics throughout are well informed, and show Van Dine's flair with intellectual subjects. He gets some fine prose style, out of evoking the names of books and authors. The information on mathematical physics is remarkably modern. One character is working on an attempt to develop a statistical version of quantum mechanics. As Van Dine points out in a footnote (love those footnotes!), this was later done in real life by Broglie and Schroedinger. This was red hot material from just three years earlier when Van Dine wrote his book in 1928. (If he'd included Schroedinger's Cat, he could have made this a cozy :) How many contemporary mystery writers could publish an accurate, detailed mystery set among physicists, complete with up-to-the-minute discussions of cosmology, string theory, hadrons? It would be a formidable challenge. And who would publish it?

But Van Dine's comments linking science to mental derangement (Chapter 21) are not as informed or as original as his comments elsewhere on art.

Mike Grost

See also: http://bloodymurder.wordpress.com/2011/08/27/the-bishop-murder-case-1928-by-s-s-van-dine/