S. S. Van Dine

Biography

S. S. Van Dine was the pen name of Willard Huntington Wright (1888–1939), an American art critic and novelist who created the detective Philo Vance. After a nervous breakdown ended his career as an avant-garde art critic, Wright reinvented himself as a mystery writer, and the Philo Vance novels became enormous bestsellers in the late 1920s and 1930s. Vance, an erudite, aesthete amateur detective, solved murders using his knowledge of art, psychology, and human nature. Van Dine also wrote the influential “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories” that helped codify the Golden Age mystery.