Alias S. S. Van Dine

About this book

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.