The Canary of the title is Margaret Odell, once a showgirl in the Ziegfeld Follies, more recently an occasional nightclub singerl. When she is murdered, there are any number of suspects, all of the male variety. The police are baffled but Philo Vance is on the scene, ready to apply his brilliance, his erudition, his astonishingly nuanced grasp of human nature to the solving of the crime.