Page:The Benson Murder Case (1926).pdf/7



It gives us considerable pleasure to be able to offer to the public the "inside" record of those of former District Attorney Markham's criminal cases in which Mr. Philo Vance figured so effectively. The true inwardness of these famous cases has never before been revealed; for Mr. S. S. Van Dine, Mr. Vance's lawyer and almost constant companion, being the only person who possessed a complete record of the facts, has only recently been permitted to make them public.

After inspecting Mr. Van Dine's voluminous notes, we decided to publish "The Benson Murder Case" as the first of the series—not because it was the most interesting and startling, nor yet the most complicated and dramatic from the fictional point of view, but because, coming first chronologically, it explains how Mr. Philo Vance happened to become involved in criminal matters, and also because it possesses certain features that reveal very clearly Mr. Vance's unique analytic methods of crime detection.