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If you will refer to the municipal statistics of the City of New York, you will find that the number of unsolved major crimes during the four years that John F.-X. Markham was District Attorney, was far smaller than under any of his predecessors’ administrations. Markham projected the District Attorney’s office into all manner of criminal investigations; and, as a result, many abstruse crimes on which the Police had hopelessly gone aground were eventually disposed of.
But although he was personally credited with the many important indictments and subsequent convictions that he secured, the truth is that he was only an instrument in many of his most famous cases. The man who actually solved them and supplied the evidence for their prosecution, was in no way connected with the city’s administration, and never once came into the public eye.
At that time I happened to be both legal advisor and personal friend of this other man; and it was thus that the strange and amazing facts of the situation became known to me. But not until recently have I been at liberty to make them public. Even now I am not permitted to divulge the man’s name, and, for that reason, I have chosen, arbitrarily, to refer to him throughout these ex-officio[1] reports as Philo Vance.
It is, of course, possible that some of his acquaintances may, through my revelations, be able to guess his identity; and if such should prove the case, I beg of them to guard that knowledge; for though he has now gone to Italy to live, and has given me permission to record the exploits of which he was the unique central character, he has very emphatically imposed his anonymity upon me; and I should not like to feel that, through any lack of discretion or delicacy, I have been the cause of his secret becoming generally known.
The present chronicle has to do with Vance’s solution of the notorious Benson murder which, due to the unexpectedness of the crime, the prominence of the persons involved, and the startling evidence adduced, was invested with an interest rarely surpassed in the annals of New York’s criminal history.
This sensational case was the first of many in which Vance figured as a kind of amicus curiae[2] in Markham’s investigations.
Philo Vance
John F.-X. Markham – District Attorney of New York County.
Alvin H. Benson – well-known Wall Street broker and man-about-town, who was mysteriously murdered in his home.
Major Anthony Benson – brother of the murdered man.
Mrs. Anna Platz – housekeeper for Alvin Benson.
Muriel St. Clair – a young singer.
Captain Philip Leacock – Miss St. Clair’s fiancé.
Leander Pfyfe – intimate friend of Alvin Benson’s.
Mrs. Paula Banning – a friend of Leander Pfyfe’s.
Elsie Hoffman – secretary of the firm of Benson and Benson.
Colonel Bigsby Ostrander – a retired army officer.
William H. Moriarty – an alderman, Borough of the Bronx.
Jack Prisco – elevator-boy at the Chatham Arms.
George G. Stitt – of the firm of Stitt and McCoy, Public Accountants.
Maurice Dinwiddie – Assistant District Attorney.
Chief Inspector O’Brien – of the Police Department of New York City.
William M. Moran – Commanding Officer of the Detective Bureau.
Ernest Heath – Sergeant of the Homicide Bureau.
Burke – Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
Snitkin – Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
Emery – Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
Ben Hanlon – Commanding Officer of Detectives assigned to District Attorney’s office.
Phelps – Detective assigned to District Attorney’s office.
Tracy – Detective assigned to District Attorney’s office.
Springer – Detective assigned to District Attorney’s office.
Higginbotham – Detective assigned to District Attorney’s office.
Captain Carl Hagedorn – fire-arms expert.
Dr. Doremus – Medical Examiner.
Francis Swacker – Secretary to the District Attorney.
Currie – Vance’s valet.
Chapter I. Philo Vance at Home
(Friday, June 14; 8.30 a.m.)
It happened that, on the morning of the momentous June the fourteenth when the discovery of the murdered body of Alvin H. Benson created a sensation which, to this day, has not entirely died away, I had breakfasted with Philo Vance in his apartment. It was not unusual for me to share Vance’s luncheons and dinners, but to have breakfast with him was something of an occasion. He was a late riser, and it was his habit to remain incommunicado[3] until his midday meal.
The reason for this early meeting was a matter of business—or, rather, of aesthetics. On the afternoon of the previous day Vance had attended a preview of Vollard’s collection of Cézanne water-colors at the Kessler Galleries, and having seen several pictures he particularly wanted, he had invited me to an early breakfast to give me instructions regarding their purchase.
A word concerning my relationship with Vance is necessary to clarify my rôle[4] of narrator in this chronicle. The legal tradition is deeply imbedded in my family, and when my preparatory-school days were over, I was sent, almost as a matter of course, to Harvard to study law. It was there I met Vance, a reserved, cynical and caustic freshman who was the bane of his professors and the fear of his fellow-classmen. Why he should have chosen me, of all the students at the University, for his extra-scholastic association, I have never been able to understand fully. My own liking for Vance was simply explained: he fascinated and interested me, and supplied me with a novel kind of intellectual diversion. In his liking for me, however, no such basis of appeal was present. I was (and am now) a commonplace fellow, possessed of a conservative and rather conventional mind. But, at least, my mentality was not rigid, and the ponderosity of the legal procedure did not impress me greatly—which is why, no doubt, I had little taste for my inherited profession—; and it is possible that these traits found certain affinities in Vance’s unconscious mind. There is, to be sure, the less consoling explanation that I appealed to Vance as a kind of foil, or anchorage, and that he sensed in my nature a complementary antithesis to his own. But whatever the explanation, we were much together; and, as the years went by, that association ripened into an inseparable friendship.
