American & Canadian Literature, Genres & Literary Forms, US & Canadian Literary Biography

Alias S. S. Van Dine

Name: Alias S. S. Van Dine
Author: John Loughery
ISBN: 9780684193588

by John Loughery

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Overview

During the first four tumultuous decades of this century, Willard Huntington Wright lived two lives: before World War I, he was a pioneering art critic and editor of the avant-garde magazine The Smart Set, who numbered among his friends Alfred Stieglitz, H. L. Mencken, and Theodore Dreiser. In the 1920s, he transformed himself into S. S. Van Dine, one of America's best-selling authors. Mysteries featuring his detective Philo Vance--The Benson Murder Case, The "Canary" Murder Case, The Bishop Murder Case, among others--sold more than a million copies by the end of the decade, and dominated book sales during the first rough months of the Great Depression. Even by the standards of the Jazz Age, Wright lived an outsized life--in his palatial Manhattan penthouse he maintained an aquarium of two thousand exotic fish. But by the late 1930s, he was a broken, desperate man consumed by the fear of failure that had shadowed him all his life. The fashions of detective fiction had changed--Wright deplored the "all booze and erections style" of his competitor Dashiell Hammett--and he was reduced to writing novelizations of his failed screenplays in order to get by. John Loughery depicts in bewitching detail the rise and fall of a writer who helped create the modern detective novel, and tells with heartbreaking eloquence the story of a man whose fame ultimately destroyed him. Re-creating the artistic spirit of a lost world, Alias S. S. Van Dine is a brilliant work of literary archaeology that resurrects a man, his books, and the era whose glamour and flaws he came to represent so completely.

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Editorials

Library Journal

Loughery, who is art critic of The Hudson Review , presents a well-researched, candid, contemporary, and objective assessment of Willard Huntington Wright, who under the pseudonym S.S. Van Dine wrote the phenomenally successful Philo Vance detective novels of the 1920s. Following his struggles to establish himself as art critic, reviewer, editor, novelist, and self-styled man of letters, the impoverished, eccentric Wright was to find success only as the writer of popular detective fiction. In Wright's spectacular rise and downfall, Loughery sees ``a very American story of ambition, struggle, and success.'' In its extravagance, arrogance, and intellectualism, Wright's own life personified the fictional detective he created. Loughery credits Wright with ``legitimizing and invigorating detective fiction in America,'' and with his efforts, through art criticism, to promote acceptance of modern painting. An excellent, balanced study, recommended for public and academic collections in American literature and popular culture.-- Lesley Jorbin, Cleveland State Univ. Lib.