Criticisms of Vance and The Novels
Vance's character as portrayed in the novels might seem to many modern readers to be supercilious, obnoxiously affected, and highly irritating. He struck some contemporaries that way as well. At the height of Philo Vance's popularity, comic poet Ogden Nash wrote:
Philo Vance
Needs a kick in the pance.
Famed hardboiled-detective author Raymond Chandler referred to Vance in his essay "The Simple Art of Murder" as "the most asinine character in detective fiction." In Chandler's novel The Lady in the Lake, Marlowe briefly uses Philo Vance as an ironical alias. A criticism of Vance's "phony English accent" also appears in Chandler's Farewell My Lovely. In Chandler's The Big Sleep Marlowe says he's "not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance" and explains that his method owes more to judgement of character than finding clues the police have missed.
Julian Symons in his history of detective fiction, Bloody Murder, says: "The decline in the last six Vance books is so steep that the critic who called the ninth of them one more stitch in his literary shroud was not overstating the case."
A Catalogue of Crime, by Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor, criticizes "...the phony footnotes, the phony English accent of Philo Vance, and the general apathy of the detective system in all these books..." in all the Vance novels. It reviews only seven of the twelve novels, panning all but the first and the last: The Benson Murder Case, which it calls "The first and best..." and The Winter Murder Case, of which it says, "In fact, this short book is pleasant reading..."
Read more about this topic: Philo Vance
Famous quotes containing the words criticisms of, criticisms and/or novels:
“The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premises on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments ... but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)