"S. S. Van Dine" was the pen name of Willard Huntington Wright, a prominent art critic who initially sought to conceal his authorship of the novels.

In the early novels, Van Dine claimed that "Philo Vance" was an alias, and that details of the sleuth's adventures had been altered to protect his true identity, even if "he has now gone to Italy to live".

He had courses in the history of religions, the Greek classics, biology, civics, and political economy, philosophy, anthropology, literature, theoretical, and experimental psychology, and ancient and modern languages.

Moreover, he was resolute both in his avoidance of any attitude that savoured of credulousness and in his adherence to cold, logical exactness in his mental processes.In the same book, Van Dine detailed Vance's physical features: He was unusually good-looking, although his mouth was ascetic and cruel...there was a slightly derisive hauteur in the lift of his eyebrows...His forehead was full and sloping—it was the artist's, rather than the scholar's, brow.

His nose was straight and slender, and his chin narrow but prominent, with an unusually deep cleft...Vance was slightly under six feet, graceful, and giving the impression of sinewy strength and nervous endurance.

In the second adventure, The Canary Murder Case (set in 1927), Van Dine says that Vance was "not yet thirty-five... His face was slender and mobile; but there was a stern, sardonic expression to his features, which acted as a barrier between him and his fellows."

Vance was highly skilled at many things: an "expert fencer", a golfer with a three handicap, a breeder and shower of thoroughbred dogs, a talented polo player, a master poker player, a winning handicapper of race horses, experience in archery ("a bit of potting at Oxford," as he referred to it), a patron of classical music, a connoisseur of fine food and drink, knowledgeable of chess, and of several foreign languages.

Vance often wore a monocle, dressed impeccably (usually going out with chamois gloves), and his speech frequently tended to be quaint: He was also a heavy smoker, lighting up and puffing on his Regies throughout the stories.

Although Van Dine was one of the most educated and cosmopolitan detective writers of his time, in his essays he dismissed the idea of the mystery story as serious literature.

On a few occasions, Vance and Van Dine (usually accompanied by Markham and Heath) briefly travel to the Bronx, Westchester County, and New Jersey in the course of their investigations.

I have often marvelled at the friendship of these two antipodal men … Markham was forthright, brusque, and on occasion, domineering, taking life with grim and serious concern … Vance, on the other hand, was volatile, debonair, and possessed of a perpetual Juvenalian cynicism …Other individuals who appear frequently include Francis Swacker, Markham's male secretary, and Guilfoyle, Hennessey, Snitkin, and Burke, all detectives under Heath in the Homicide Bureau.

Famed hardboiled-detective author Raymond Chandler referred to Vance in his essay "The Simple Art of Murder" as "the most asinine character in detective fiction".

In Chandler's The Big Sleep, Marlowe says he's "not Sherlock Holmes or Philo Vance" and explains that his method owes more to judgement of character than finding clues the police have missed.

Julian Symons in his history of detective fiction, Bloody Murder, says: "The decline in the last six Vance books is so steep that the critic who called the ninth of them one more stitch in his literary shroud was not overstating the case.

In The Greene Murder Case, one of the three original novels, he wrote that Vance's seemingly British manner of speaking was the result of his long education in Europe, not an affectation.

The movie The Canary Murder Case is famous for a contract dispute that eventually helped sink the career of star Louise Brooks.

[7]The Philo Vance novels were particularly well suited for films, where the more unpleasantly affected aspects of the main character could be toned down and the complex plots given more prominence.

Heath (Eugene Pallette), along with fellow detective Sherlock Holmes (Clive Brook), go up against Fu Manchu (Warner Oland).

Vance is mentioned in The Stolen Jools, an all-star film short produced by Paramount in 1931 to promote fundraising for the National Vaudeville Artists Tuberculosis Sanitarium, but does not appear.

... Joan Alexander is Ellen Deering, Vance's secretary and right-hand woman.”[10] George Petrie and Humphrey Davis also co-starred as DA Markham and Sgt.