The FLAME TREE COLLECTABLE CRIME CLASSICS are chosen to create a delightful and timeless home library of classic crime and mystery thrillers. Each stunning unabridged edition features deluxe cover treatments, ribbon markers, luxury endpapers and gilded edges. The first best-selling title in S.S. Van Dine's series of Philo Vance detective mysteries, The Benson Murder Case (1926), was inspired by the real-life unsolved murder of Joseph Bowne Elwell (1873-1920) in which the victim was shot from within his locked house. Intellectual dandy and amateur sleuth Vance a man of unusual culture and brilliance finds the case of murdered playboy stockbroker Alvin Benson fascinating, the missing toupee and false teeth being especially curious... Vance kindly comes to the aid of his friend District Attorney Markham and sets about tracking down the killer using his cerebral powers of deduction in contrast to the short-sighted methods of the police. A specially commissioned biography of the author and a glossary of Victorian and Literary terms make this new edition essential for all classic crime fans! AUTHOR: S.S. Van Dine was the crime-novel pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright (1888 1939), an American journalist, critic and novelist. He wrote scathing book reviews as literary editor for the Los Angeles Times, and would later publish unconventional and avant-garde work by the likes of D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad and Ezra Pound for the magazine The Smart Set. Yet it was as a writer of detective fiction that he found financial success. His series of novels featuring amateur sleuth and art lover Philo Vance, the first of which was The Benson Murder Case (1926), were so popular that they also lead to movies and radio, and prevented Wright from ever returning to the less lucrative writing of which he would have been more proud. Hardback Deluxe edition, foiled and embossed, with gilded edges.