Okay, okay. There are those who called S.S. van Dine’s The Dragon Murder Case “one more stitch in his literary shroud,” and I can see the point. Man about town dives drunkenly into a bottomless pool that suffers from a mysterious Native American curse in full view of a dozen witnesses and never surfaces. Detection and aesthetic lectures ensue. The solution to the puzzle: ridiculously unaesthetic from any point of view. But the landscape – well, now there’s nothing that’s not aesthetic about the landscape up here, as even van Dine’s foppish detective, Philo Vance, would admit.
I picked up The Dragon Murder Case because I had read that it was set on the Billings Estate, which once occupied the land we now know as Ft. Tryon Park and the Cloisters. The map that appears in the front of the van Dine’s book makes it clear that this is not the case. The story is not set in Ft. Tryon Park, but rather in its northern neighbor, Inwood Hill Park, which is everything Ft. Tryon and the Billings estate is not.
So it seems only natural – at least if you’re me – to draft George, expedition photographer and all-around hubby-in-chief, for a trip around the remaining ruins to ascertain what parts of this meticulous map are real, and which are pure authorial imagination.
Brace yourselves. This could take a while, folks (as in several blog posts). But one good place to start is this actual historical map, which points to at least three identifiable sites on van Dine’s map: The Indian caves and tulip tree, beneath which Peter Minuit supposedly bought Manhattan Island for 60 guilders. The Indian Reservation and the shell beds. And the House of Mercy.
More on all three, as well as the Billings Estate, soon.
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