The Benson Murder Case

A Wall Street broker sits dead in his own armchair in a West Forty-eighth Street brownstone, a book still open in his hand, shot once through the forehead. Upstairs lie his toupee and his false teeth — whoever he let in after midnight, he received without them. On the mantel: a woman's gold-mesh handbag and long white kid gloves.

District Attorney Markham has a monogram, a motive, and an army Colt. Philo Vance — who arrives late in a lavender tie, still mourning two Cezanne watercolors he failed to buy — declines to look at the cigarette ends or the grey Cadillac outside, insisting that evidence proves nothing and temperament everything. Every arrest Markham readies, Vance blocks. The debut of American detective fiction's most insufferable, and most imitated, amateur.