Golden Age of Detective Fiction

Trigger Warning: This book mentions the Ku Klux Klan several times and is overtly racist.

Kaspar Kenting, playboy, and Lothario have been kidnapped from his wealthy family home in the middle of the night. His kidnappers let him take various personal grooming items and clothes before shuttling him out the window. His mysterious kidnappers leave a ransom note with letters cut out and footprints in the flowerbed. The clues are so numerous and obvious that the police believe Kaspar Kenting has staged his disappearance to collect the ransom money, which will bankrupt the rest of the family and free him from his brother, Kenyon Kenting’s control.

However, to solve the kidnapping as quickly as possible, the district attorney, Markham, asks Philo Vance to help recover Kaspar Kenting if he is still alive. Despite Vance’s many objections to paying the ransom and leaving it in the hollow of a tree, the Kenting family agrees to the kidnapper’s demands.

The ransom dropped is foiled by Kaspar Kenting’s mother-in-law, who believes her sickly, young son, Fraim Falloway, is somehow involved in the kidnapping. The danger for the Kenting family escalates when Kaspar’s body is found, and the terrified Mrs. Kenting is kidnapped.

The Review

The Kidnap Murder Case by S. S. Van Dine falters under the weight of the eight-seven years since its original printing. Everything about it feels old and tired. The run-of-the-mill kidnapping is replete with a ransom note and a frantic district attorney that adorns so many 1930s mysteries. However, what sets this book apart is how heavily imbued it is with American racism.

The Kenting family is prominent for their wealth and affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan. This is explicitly stated in the novel, and the patriarch of the Kenting family (who is dead) was such a fanatic that he named all of his children with triple K initials. His children, Kaspar and Kenting, have tried to distance themselves from their father’s legacy by dropping their middle initials and weakly refuting their father’s ideals. However, they still live in his mansion, attempt to maintain his fortune, and never outright deny their father’s standards. This is how the book begins.

So when the reader learns that Kaspar Kenting, the second son of such a reputed racist, is kidnapped, it is hard for me, as a modern reader, to have much empathy for his fate. Even in the story, Kaspar Kenting is disliked in his family for womanizing and racking up significant gambling debts; they try to rescue him out of duty, not a feeling of familial love. His brother Kenyon clearly loathes Kaspar and is in love with Kaspar’s mousy wife.

Such a reviled victim means that other story components must be enthralling and fall flat. The dullest of all is Philo Vance, whose dropped g’s and obscure quotes are more tiresome than enlivening, and his chronicler Van is so enamored with Vance, with long discursive paragraph eulogizing Vance’s many accomplishments in an attempt to make the reader believe that Vance is really moving the action of the story. He’s not; he’s going from set piece to set piece, talking to the victims, and accruing essential clues.

There are multiple attempts by Van Dine to jazz up the plot by adding in a bunch of details about a stolen gem collection, and there’s a weird subplot about Fraim Falloway’s, Mrs. Kenting’s brother’s, possible endocrine problem and bad genes that are cured by Philo Vance calling a specialist and getting him medication.

There are also a lot of clumsy metaphors about washing away the sins of the father and repudiating his racist ways so the family can be healthy—except this is immediately undercut by the climax of the book revolving around Vance vanquishing the gang of kidnappers and thoroughly beating up their Chinese cook. Racism is terrible, except when the hero uses it to justify his violent acts. Eek. The Kidnap Murder Case is clearly conflicted about racial equality and eugenics.

More significant themes about American racism can be handled well in detective fiction, but this book really fumbles around, and they don’t add any other meaning to the mystery. This is not a complex case to crack, and the police and Vance know who the culprit is early on. They are just waiting for a slip-up to catch the killer.

The mystery is trite, with a few good action sequences, but it is heavily marred by racism. Read The Kidnap Murder Case if you want, but there are much better entries in the Philo Vance series.

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