A review by paul_cornelius
The Dragon Murder Case by Willard Huntington Wright, S.S. Van Dine

2.0

Ordinarily, a mystery from the late 1920s or early 1930s provides an opportunity for thick atmosphere and setting. There wasn't much of that here, alas. At least not to my taste. It's not that the murders themselves are without a clever storyline. But everything is so centered on such a few locales that I found little room for any sense of the exotic estate house to filter through. Not only that, but the characters were colorless and had little detail. I still have no idea what anybody looks like. Not even Philo Vance himself. Last, the murders are a tad bit overcomplicated, and even though Vance explains at the end why tedious lengths were spent describing fish and the history of dragons, that did not make the suffering of reading through all those pages satisfying in retrospect. Probably my last Philo Vance novel.