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The Greene Murder Case

Page history last edited by PBworks 15 years, 5 months ago

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

 

The Greene Murder Case focuses on the murder one by one of the Greene family: "The holocaust that consumed the Greene family", as Van Dine memorably puts it. This book contains Van Dine's greatest ingenuity as a puzzle plot constructor, containing a number of clever ideas. It also completes a trilogy. Benson focused on the death of a single man, who lead a public life and was involved in business; Canary on a couple and romantic love; and Greene on a family. The three books together have a powerful cumulative impact, their imagery bringing a tragic focus to basic human institutions.

 

Unfortunately, The Greene Murder Case is not that interesting considered purely as a story, during much of its length. The murders seem routine, and the setting is bland. But the mystery plot eventually develops some good features, especially in its solution. MILD SPOILERS:

 

The core mystery plot can be followed most clearly in Chapters 1-6, and 13.

 

Philo Vance starts to solve the mystery in Chapter 16, explaining his ideas about the footprints. This is an example of inductive reasoning in detective fiction: Vance starts to notice common features in various sets of footprints, and draws conclusions from them.

 

The visit in Chapter 18, is poetic and atmospheric. It seems to correspond with things we see in our dreams. Vance explicitly says it is something he is dreaming about. The locked library anticipates the locked crypt in The Dragon Murder Case. It also anticipates the locked library room in Ursula K. LeGuin's fantasy novel, Voices (2004).

 

Markham's lying about warrants is a major felony (Chapter 18). It is not something a real life District Attorney would do, one hopes. In any case, it seems like a deplorable attack on the rule of law: something that will also be a problem with the finale of The Bishop Murder Case.

 

The book contains Vance's unusual summary of the crimes in Chapter 23. Many mysteries contain what Carolyn Wells calls a tabulation: a list of unsolved questions about the crime. But the list in The Greene Murder Case goes far beyond this. It is essentially a summary of the whole novel in outline form. It is an unfolding of the inner structure of the novel in explicit, concrete form. It makes The Greene Murder Case something of an experimental novel: a book that innovates in the form of fiction.

 

The solution of the mystery is in Chapter 26. This too contains some off-trail approaches. This contains an original plot idea, that offers a variation on standard plot concepts in mystery fiction. This is the most significant part of the novel.

 

The unusual plot ideas in The Greene Murder Case likely influenced Ellery Queen's The Tragedy of Y (1932), and from thence, some later Queen novels. The Tragedy of Y is also an experimentally-plotted variation on Golden Age mystery fiction.

 

Parts of the solution of The Greene Murder Case use techniques and approaches, that in other books could be used to create impossible crimes. While The Greene Murder Case is not an impossible crime story, it has links to that tradition.

 

The revelation of the killer's identity in the solution has some unusual aspects. There do not seem to be any actual clues, that directly identify or point to the murderer. In the previous Chapter 25, the killer is revealed at the end of a suspense passage. And Vance simply takes it for granted from this moment on, that the killer is now revealed. But: if there are no clues, there are lots of ingenious ideas about how this particular killer could have done the crimes. The book is a real puzzle plot mystery: how this killer pulled of the murders involves some ingenious, clever surprises, all of which are logically and fairly developed from evidence in the story. This situation: "a puzzle plot about a killer, without actual clues to the killer's identity", gives the book an unusual logical structure. One suspects that it is hardly unique in mystery literature in this regard, though.

 

Mike Grost


A few thoughts on The Greene Murder Case.

 

The plot has some issues for me. The will that requires the family members to live in the house for 25 years seems dodgy, something forced by the plot. The author needs to have these characters sit around in the house waiting to be killed. And Then There Were None handles this multiple elimination gambit much more interesingly. So does Rhode's Murder on Praed Street, for that matter.

 

Why on earth did the police not ask Ada about the "private mailbox"? Did I miss something there? That's just not credible -- again it seems like a dodge by the author.

 

Van Dine's brilliant deduction that there was no burglar seems quite simple today?

 

Can you really deduce that much from shooting victim's facial expressions?

 

Oddly, since Van Dine is associated with the "pure puzzle," thoughout Greene he and Philo are always playing up the ghastly horror of the murders and the fiendish malignant brain behind them, etc. But the characters are dull stock not capable of arousing pity or terror. The old mother is the stock self-centered invalid (rather unbelievably so -- would she really not care at all about her children being constantly shot in her house). Sybella is one of those tiresomely modern women of the twenties. There's a religious maniac maid. Not one of these characters really seems to have an interior being, all is surface. That would be fine, except for the big buildup we get from Van Dine.

 

Philo is said by the loyal Van Dine not to be affected despite his British speech patterns, picked up from school. Come on! He is absurdly affected in his speech. Somehow it's a bit easier to take someone genuinely British talking like this.

 

Van Dine as narrator is an odd contrivance. His narration is straightforward and impeccable, but he's like that character in The Sixth Sense, who only can be seen by the boy. I'm pretty sure no one by Philo ever acknowledges Van. I often have to remind myself that's he an actual character.

 

The book is very British in tone and setting, with old genteel family, servants, old mansion, etc. This, plus the copious art and cultural references, must have appealed immensely to American Anglophiliac intellectuals. It still strikes me, however, today, as it did over a decade ago, as a lumbering dinosaur.

 

My favorite thing about this novel remains the evocative frontis woodcut illustration of the Greene Mansion, which looks like something out of The Addams Family!

 

Curt


It has been about 12 years since Tobias Greene died and under his will, if his children do not continue to live in the family mansion for 25 years after his death -- if they marry, their spouses must reside there also -- they will be disinherited. Naturally this has lead to disgruntlement and tension among the siblings, and interviews with their servants confirm there have been years of "daily clashes, complainings, bitter words, sullen silences, jealousies and threats" in the Greene family. It all comes to boiling point when oldest daughter Julia is killed and her sister Ada wounded in what is initially thought to be a burglary gone wrong. It soon becomes obvious it was no such thing and the siblings do not hesitate to air their grievances against each other to DA John Markham, Philo Vance, and the usual company. In fact, when it comes to suspects, a third daughter, Sibella, declares flat out "If you're looking for possibilities you have them galore. There's no one under this ancestral roof who couldn't qualify."

 

The household consists of bedridden Mrs Greene, the four children left (Ada, Chester, Sibella, and Rex), German cook Gertrude Mannheim, given to going about muttering to herself, the maids Hemming, convinced God is smiting down the sinful Greenes, and Barton, who rightly reckons "There's something awful funny going on here", plus elderly butler Sproot who reads Martial, although only a snob would find that suspicious. Then there's Doctor Arthur Von Blon, who visits more often that caring for Mrs Greene would seem to necessitate.

Soon there is another death in the mansion....

 

My verdict: While I would not go so far as to observe that lying beneath the Greene case are what Van Dine in Lovecraftian mode describes as "obscure fetid chambers of the human soul. Black hatreds, unnatural desires, hideous impulses, obscene ambitions", the set-up is bizarre enough to make readers pay close attention to the details and the map of the house, and therefore one or two clues will probably be identifiable fairly easily. One vital to the solution is not presented in quite fair fashion unless you stretch your definition of fair, in which case I will begrudgingly agree that, well, perhaps it was. I wavered between three possible culprits and one of them was the right one -- but in all fairness, it was the last person I began to suspect. A dark novel.

 

Etext

 

Mary R

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