Philo Vance - Criticisms of Vance and The Novels

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..."