Смерть Канарейки

DETECTIVE STORY

S. S. Van Dine

THE “CANARY” 
MURDER CASE

ISBN 978-5-9925-1639-5

Ван Дайн С. С.

В17     Смерть Канарейки / С. С. Ван Дайн : книга для 
чтения на английском языке. — Санкт-Петербург : 
КАРО, 2023. — 384 с. — (Detective Story).

ISBN 978-5-9925-1639-5.

Герой произведений Ван Дайна — известный сыщик 
Фило Вэнс, стильный джентльмен из Нью-Йорка с незаурядным 
интеллектом. Он помогает полиции раскрывать 
запутанные дела. На сей раз в своей квартире задушена 
молодая певичка с Бродвея Маргарет Оделл по прозвищу 
Канарейка. Несмотря на свою молодость, Канарейка успела 
нажить врагов, и в деле несколько подозреваемых. Ин-
т рига не отпускает читателя до конца последней главы.
Неадаптированный текст романа снабжен комментариями 
автора и редактора. Книга подойдет всем любителям 
классического детектива и английского языка 
(уровень B2―C1).

УДК 372.8 
ББК 81.2 Англ-93

© КАРО, 2023
Все права защищены

УДК 372.8
ББК 81.2 Англ-93
В17

First appearances deceive many:  
the intelligence alone perceives  
what has been carefully hidden 
in the recesses of the mind.

—Phaedrus.

Introductory

For many years I was the personal attorney and 
constant companion of Mr. Philo Vance; and this 
period covered the four years during which Mr. John 
F.-X. Markham, Vance’s closest friend, was District 
Attorney of New York. As a result it was my privilege 
to be a spectator of what I believe was the most 
amazing series of criminal cases that ever passed 
before the eyes of a young lawyer. Indeed, the grim 
dramas I witnessed during that period constitute 
one of the most astonishing secret documents in 
American police history.
Of these dramas Vance was the central character. 
By an analytical and interpretative process which, 
as far as I know, has never before been applied to 
criminal activities, he succeeded in solving many of 
the important crimes on which both the police and 
the District Attorney’s office had hopelessly fallen 
down.
Due to my peculiar relations with Vance it 
happened that not only did I participate in all the cases 
with which he was connected, but I was also present 
at most of the informal discussions concerning them 
which took place between him and the District 
Attorney; and, being of methodical temperament, I 

kept a complete record of them. It is fortunate that 
I performed this gratuitous labor of accumulation 
and transcription, for now that circumstances have 
rendered possible my making the cases public, I am 
able to present them in full detail and with all their 
various sidelights and succeeding steps.
In another volume—“The Benson Murder 
Case”—I have related how Vance happened to become 
involved in criminal investigation, and have also set 
forth the unique analytic methods of crime detection 
by which he solved the problem of Alvin Benson’s 
mysterious murder.
The present chronicle has to do with Vance’s 
solution of the brutal murder of Margaret Odell—a 
cause célèbre1 which came to be known as the 
“Canary” murder. The strangeness, the daring, the 
seeming impenetrability of the crime marked it as 
one of the most singular and astonishing cases in New 
York’s police annals; and had it not been for Philo 
Vance’s participation in its solution, I firmly believe 
it would have remained one of the great unsolved 
mysteries of this country.
S. S. Van Dine.
New York.

1 cause célèbre (фр.) — громкое дело. — Здесь и далее комментарии 
на русском языке принадлежат редактору.

Characters Of The Book

Philo Vance
John F.-X. Makkham — District Attorney of New York 
County.
Margaret Odell (The “Canary”) — Famous Broadway 
beauty and ex-Follies girl, who was mysteriously 
murdered in her apartment.
Amy Gibson — Margaret Odell’s maid.
Charles Cleaver — A man-about-town.
Kenneth Spotswoode — A manufacturer.
Louis Mannix — An importer.
Dr. Ambroise Lindquist — A fashionable neurologist.
Tony Skeel — A professional burglar.
William Elmer Jessup — Telephone operator.
Harry Spively — Telephone operator.
Alys La Fosse — A musical-comedy actress.
Wiley Allen — A gambler.
Potts — A street-cleaner.
Amos Feathergill — Assistant District Attorney.
William M. Moran — Commanding Officer of the 
Detective Bureau.
Ernest Heath — Sergeant of the Homicide Bureau.
Snitkin — Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
Guilfoyle — Detective of the Homicide Bureau.

Burke — Detective of the Homicide Bureau.
Tracy — Detective assigned to District Attorney’s 
office.
Deputy-Inspector Conrad Brenner — Burglar-tools 
expert.
Captain Dubois — Finger-print expert.
Detective Bellamy — Finger-print expert.
Peter Quackenbush — Official photographer.
Dr. Doremus — Medical Examiner.
Swacker — Secretary to the District Attorney.
Currie — Vance’s valet.

Chapter I
The “Canary”

In the offices of the Homicide Bureau of the 
Detective Division of the New York Police Department, 
on the third floor of the Police Headquarters building 
in Center Street, there is a large steel filing cabinet; 
and within it, among thousands of others of its kind, 
there reposes a small green index-card on which is 
typed: “ODELL, MARGARET. 184 West 71st Street. 
Sept. 10. Murder: Strangled about 11 p.m. Apartment 
ransacked. Jewelry stolen. Body found by Amy Gibson, 
maid.”
Here, in a few commonplace words, is the bleak, 
unadorned statement of one of the most astonishing 
crimes in the police annals of this country—a 
crime so contradictory, so baffling, so ingenious, so 
unique, that for many days the best minds of the 
Police Department and the District Attorney’s office 
were completely at a loss as to even a method of 
approach. Each line of investigation only tended to 
prove that Margaret Odell could not possibly have 
been murdered. And yet, huddled on the great silken 
davenport in her living-room lay the girl’s strangled 
body, giving the lie to so grotesque a conclusion.

The true story of this crime, as it eventually 
came to light after a disheartening period of utter 
darkness and confusion, revealed many strange 
and bizarre ramifications, many dark recesses of 
man’s unexplored nature, and the uncanny subtlety 
of a human mind sharpened by desperate and 
tragic despair. And it also revealed a hidden page 
of passional melodrama which, in its essence and 
organisms, was no less romantic and fascinating than 
that vivid, theatrical section of the Comédie Humaine2 
which deals with the fabulous love of Baron Nucingen 
for Esther van Gobseck, and with the unhappy 
Torpille’s tragic death.
Margaret Odell was a product of the bohemian 
demi-monde3 of Broadway—a scintillant figure who 
seemed somehow to typify the gaudy and spurious 
romance of transient gaiety. For nearly two years 
before her death she had been the most conspicuous 
and, in a sense, popular figure of the city’s night life. In 
our grandparents’ day she might have had conferred 
upon her that somewhat questionable designation, 
“the toast of the town”; but to-day there are too many 
aspirants for this classification, too many cliques and 
violent schisms in the Lepidoptera of our café life, 
to permit of any one competitor being thus singled 

2 Comédie Humaine — La Comédie humaine, «Человеческая 
комедия» — цикл сочинений французского писателя 
Оноре де Бальзака.
3 demi-monde (фр.) — сумерки, полусвет