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.
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.