Philo Vance is a fictional amateur detective originally featured in 12 crime novels by S. S. Van Dine in the 1920s and 1930s. During that time, Vance was immensely popular in books, films, and radio. He was portrayed as a stylish—even foppish— dandy, a New York bon vivant possessing a highly intellectual bent. "S. S.

Philo Vance, accompanied by his prize-losing Scottish terrier, investigates the locked-room murder of a prominent and much-hated collector whose broken Chinese vase provides an important clue.

May 24, 2007 · Philo Vance was the detective creation of S. S. Van Dine first published in the mid 1920s. Vance, in the original books, is an intellectual so highly refined he seems he might be ghostwritten by P. G. Wodehouse.

Wright was active in avant-garde cultural circles in pre-World War I New York, and under the pen name (which he originally used to conceal his identity) he created the fictional detective Philo Vance, a sleuth and aesthete who first appeared in books in …

Philo Vance, fictional amateur detective, the protagonist of 12 detective stories by American writer S.S. Van Dine. A wealthy American graduate of the University of Oxford, Vance is a cultivated but snobbish man of wide-ranging interests and talents.

The Philo Vance Murder Cases series is a well-known series of mystery, historical fiction, detective fiction, and crime fiction novels. It is written by a popular American writer named Willard Huntington Wright under the pseudonym of S.S. Van Dine.

Philo Vance returned to the airwaves in 1948 as a syndicated series starring Jackson Beck, the veteran radio actor and narrator. Philo Vance was the most popular fictional detective during the...