ABSTRACT
For fans of armchair sleuths and gumshoes, Nick Carraway's relative passivity as an observer of what a true shamus might call The Gatsby Murder Case can be frustrating. More importantly, Willard Huntington Wright's career as a novelist began a year after Gatsby's publication, thanks to none other than F. Scott Fitzgerald's own editor, Maxwell Perkins. The most relevant to Fitzgerald for several different reasons is the one who happened to dominate the American school: S. S. Van Dine, the pen name of Wright, who produced a dozen mysteries between 1926 and 1939 starring his Holmes-derived creation, the aesthete Philo Vance. In The Benson Murder Case, for example, upon touring the crime scene, Vance observes that the victim died without his toupee on or his dentures in. Both The Benson Murder Case and The "Canary" Murder Case are not only examples of detective novels as "clue puzzles", but they are also "locked-room" mysteries.
