Dragons and games of chance and Philo Vance's game of death
In the fourth Leonaur volume of the Philo Vance Murder Cases we find the urbane New Yorker tackling a particularly puzzling crime. In 'The Dragon Murder Case'-the seventh tale-a guest visiting a country house dives into the swimming pool and instead of climbing out again disappears completely. Suspicions are quickly raised concerning the intervention of a vengeful dragon, but Philo Vance is not so sure. He is, as devotees know, an expert in disappearances, criminals, dragons and how to solve a whodunit that would baffle anyone else. In the 'The Casino Murder Case', Vance receives an anonymous letter alerting him to imminent danger to a member of his own family. If he wants information which will assist him in averting the threat he must visit a certain Casino to find it. Predictably, once there the body count starts to rise .Vance once more has a case on his hands and a killer to uncover-and this time the preferred weapon is the poison bottle. This is another satisfying helping of detective fiction by one of its masters-with more to come as Leonaur publishes the complete collection of these classic stories.
