Editing Philo Vance (section)

==Criticisms of Vance and the novels==
At the height of Philo Vance's popularity, comic poet [[Ogden Nash]] wrote:

<blockquote>
Philo Vance<br />
Needs a kick in the pance.
</blockquote>

Famed hardboiled-detective author [[Raymond Chandler]] referred to Vance in his essay "[[The Simple Art of Murder]]" as "the most [[wiktionary:asinine|asinine]] character in detective fiction". In Chandler's novel ''[[The Lady in the Lake]]'', Marlowe briefly uses Philo Vance as an ironical alias.  A criticism of Vance's "phony English accent" also appears in Chandler's ''[[Farewell My Lovely]]''.  In Chandler's ''[[The Big Sleep]]'', Marlowe says he's "not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance" and explains that his method owes more to judgement of character than finding clues the police have missed.

[[Julian Symons]] in his history of detective fiction, ''Bloody Murder'', says: "The decline in the last six Vance books is so steep that the critic who called the ninth of them one more stitch in his literary shroud was not overstating the case."<ref name="SYM">Symons, Julian, ''Bloody Murder'', London: Faber and Faber 1972, with revisions in Penguin Books 1974, {{ISBN|0-14-003794-2}}</ref>

In ''[[A Catalogue of Crime]]'', [[Jacques Barzun]] and Wendell Hertig Taylor criticize "… the phony footnotes, the phony English accent of Philo Vance, and the general apathy of the detective system in all these books …", in all the Vance novels. They review only seven of the 12 novels, panning all but the first and the last: ''The Benson Murder Case'', which they call "The first and best …" and ''The Winter Murder Case'', of which they write, "In fact, this short book is pleasant reading …"<ref>{{cite book |last1=Barzun |first1=Jazques |author-link1=Jacques Barzun |last2=Taylor |first2=Wendell Hertig |date=1971 |title=[[A Catalogue of Crime]] |location=New York |publisher=Harper & Row |pages=412–413 |oclc=47364442  }}</ref>

In regard to Vance's supposedly phony accent, Van Dine addressed the issue early on. In ''The Greene Murder Case'', one of the three original novels, he wrote that Vance's seemingly British manner of speaking was the result of his long education in Europe, not an affectation. He described Vance as indifferent to what people thought of him and not interested in impressing them.