S. S. Van Dine

S. S. Van Dine was the pen name of American author and art critic Willard Huntington Wright (1888–1939). Once a prominent literary editor and outspoken champion of modern art, Wright turned to detective fiction during a prolonged illness. His sophisticated amateur sleuth, Philo Vance, became one of the most celebrated fictional detectives of the 1920s and 1930s. Van Dine wrote twelve Philo Vance mysteries and helped shape the classic detective genre through his influential “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.”