Literary Significance and Criticism
According to the 1936 introduction to the novel, in the omnibus Philo Vance Murder Cases, the two halves were written nearly a year apart. Several real-life friends of author S. S. Van Dine appear as themselves in the second half of the novel.
"Though dogs can be dangerous in life and in detection, this imbroglio by the precious and pedantic Van Dine is rather better than the rest of those written after 1930. It is a locked-room murder, there are clues, and Vance is not obnoxious beyond endurance."
Read more about this topic: The Kennel Murder Case
Famous quotes containing the words literary, significance and/or criticism:
“In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language: the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn?—to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)