THE "CANARY" MURDER CASE

In the past I've posted about a few of the movie tie-in books I have and how I started a collection without even realizing it. Well, this volume is the oldest of the bunch. 

This particular book has a copyright of 1927 and contains several photos from the 1929 Paramount movie The "Canary" Murder Case starring William Powell, Louise Brooks, and Jean Arthur. I've never seen the movie, nor have I read the book. The story is as follows according to IMDB:

A beautiful showgirl, name "the Canary" is a scheming nightclub singer. Blackmailing is her game and with that she ends up dead. But who killed "the Canary". All the suspects knew and were used by her and everyone had a motive to see her dead. The only witness to the crime has also been 'rubbed out'. Only one man, the keen, fascinating, debonair detective Philo Vance, would be able to figure out who is the killer. (Written by Tony Fontana)

This book was the second in a series of Philo Vance novels written by S. S. Van Dine. Van Dine, whose real name was Willard Huntington Wright, was born in 1888 in Charlottesville, Virginia and died in 1939. To read more about him click here. 

By the time the second of the series, The Canary Murder Case, appeared a year later, Van Dine had become a best-seller, Vance was a household word, and guessing the author's identity was a favorite pastime. When Van Dine wrote an article for a Chicago paper, he responded to the editor's malicious request for a photo with a caricature of himself (having been a painter) which was faithful in every detail, yet unfaithful in general impression. It had the prehensile ears, hair parted to the right, beard, mustache, and monocle. This drawing led to a comparison of the works of S. S. Van Dine with those of Willard Huntington Wright, and thus to a discovery of the author's closely-guarded identity thru certain similarities in those works. (Source: Louise Brooks Society)

Click on images to see them larger.

As far as the film is concerned, there is this interesting little tidbit at Wikipedia about the production:

The first film in the series of Philo Vance films adapted from the novels was The Canary Murder Case (1929), starring William Powell as Philo Vance and Louise Brooks as the Canary. This film became notorious as the film where Brooks -- having left for Europe to make two films for director G. W. Pabst -- refused to return to the U.S. to dub her dialogue for the sound version. Paramount Pictures then terminated Brooks, and hired actress Margaret Livingston to dub the dialogue for Brooks instead. (Source: Wikipedia)

It all looks a bit dry between the pages, no pun intended considering how yellowed they are, but the movie clip below makes it look interesting. I don't know that I'll ever get around to reading it with so many other books already stacked up on the floor awaiting my attention. But it's worth having just for the photos. I wish I knew which book was the first ever published with a studio tie-in. I've never found any information online. It's all just ephemera.