For many years I was the personal attorney and constant companion of Mr. Philo Vance; and this period covered the four years during which Mr. John F.-X. Markham, Vance’s closest friend, was District Attorney of New York. As a result it was my privilege to be a spectator of what I believe was the most amazing series of criminal cases that ever passed before the eyes of a young lawyer. Indeed, the grim dramas I witnessed during that period constitute one of the most astonishing secret documents in American police history.
Of these dramas Vance was the central character. By an analytical and interpretative process which, as far as I know, has never before been applied to criminal activities, he succeeded in solving many of the important crimes on which both the police and the District Attorney’s office had hopelessly fallen down.
Due to my peculiar relations with Vance it happened that not only did I participate in all the cases with which he was connected, but I was also present at most of the informal discussions concerning them which took place between him and the District Attorney; and, being of methodical temperament, I kept a complete record of them. It is fortunate that I performed this gratuitous labor of accumulation and transcription, for now that circumstances have rendered possible my making the cases public, I am able to present them in full detail and with all their various sidelights and succeeding steps.
In another volume—“The Benson Murder Case”—I have related how Vance happened to become involved in criminal investigation, and have also set forth the unique analytic methods of crime detection by which he solved the problem of Alvin Benson’s mysterious murder.
The present chronicle has to do with Vance’s solution of the brutal murder of Margaret Odell—a cause célèbre[1] which came to be known as the “Canary” murder. The strangeness, the daring, the seeming impenetrability of the crime marked it as one of the most singular and astonishing cases in New York’s police annals; and had it not been for Philo Vance’s participation in its solution, I firmly believe it would have remained one of the great unsolved mysteries of this country.
Philo Vance
John F.-X. Makkham – District Attorney of New York County.
Margaret Odell (The “Canary”) – Famous Broadway beauty and ex-Follies girl, who was mysteriously murdered in her apartment.
Amy Gibson – Margaret Odell’s maid.
Charles Cleaver – A man-about-town.
Kenneth Spotswoode – A manufacturer.
Louis Mannix – An importer.
Dr. Ambroise Lindquist – A fashionable neurologist.
Tony Skeel – A professional burglar.
William Elmer Jessup – Telephone operator.
Harry Spively – Telephone operator.
Alys La Fosse – A musical-comedy actress.
Wiley Allen – A gambler.
Potts – A street-cleaner.
Amos Feathergill – Assistant District Attorney.
William M. Moran – Commanding Officer of the Detective Bureau.
Ernest Heath – Sergeant of the Homicide Bureau.
Snitkin – Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
Guilfoyle – Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
Burke – Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
Tracy – Detective assigned to District Attorney’s office.
Deputy-Inspector Conrad Brenner – Burglar-tools expert.
Captain Dubois – Finger-print expert.
Detective Bellamy – Finger-print expert.
Peter Quackenbush – Official photographer.
Dr. Doremus – Medical Examiner.
Swacker – Secretary to the District Attorney.
Currie – Vance’s valet.
In the offices of the Homicide Bureau of the Detective Division of the New York Police Department, on the third floor of the Police Headquarters building in Center Street, there is a large steel filing cabinet; and within it, among thousands of others of its kind, there reposes a small green index-card on which is typed: “
