SS Van Dine

Portrait of the writer Willard Huntington Wright (detective writer SS Van Dine) painted by his brother Stanton Macdonald-Wright , 1913-14

SS Van Dine (born October 15, 1888 in Charlottesville , Virginia , † April 11, 1939 in New York ; actually Willard Huntington Wright ) was an American writer and art critic .

He created the fictional detective Philo Vance. This character first appeared in books in the 1920s, and then on radio broadcasts. Today Van Dine and Vance are a bit forgotten.

Life

Wright's parents were Archibald Davenport Wright and Annie Van Vranken Wright, who came from old, distinguished American families. Willard attended St. Vincent College , Pomona College, and Harvard . He also studied art in Munich and Paris ; after this apprenticeship he got a job as a literary and art critic at the Los Angeles Times . The literary naturalism shaped Wright's career in the early years (approx. 1910-1919). He wrote a novel and some short stories. As the editor of a magazine, The Smart Set , he published similar pieces by other authors.

In 1907 he married Katherine Belle Boynton of Seattle , Washington . In October 1930 he married a second time, Eleanor Rulapuagh. She was a portrait artist by the stage name Claire De Lisle.

Wright was the magazine The Smart Set (1912-1914) published in New York. He also continued to write as a journalist and critic until he overworked himself and fell ill in 1923. Wright's doctor ordered him to stay in bed because of an unspecified heart disease. Today we know that this treatment was wrong. This condition lasted more than two years and was a great emotional burden for Wright. He began collecting thousands of volumes of detective stories. In 1926 he published the first novel under the pseudonym SS Van Dine, The Benson Murder Case . Wright took his pseudonym from two sources: the first of which was an ancient family name, "Van Dyne"; the second was the English abbreviation for steam ships , "Steam Ship".

"Van" is the third first name (after the two SS) of the pseudonym - and does not correspond to the nobility predicate "Van". In the novels, the detective Philo Vance has a helper who also recorded all the stories for posterity: Van Dine. He is often referred to by Vance by his first name: Van.

During the following twelve years Wright wrote eleven detective novels about the main character Philo Vance .

It was Van Dine's intention to "save" the detective novel genre from its bad reputation among critics and to transform it into a form of high culture. Philo Vance was accordingly an esthete, somewhat affected and artificial. He was very wealthy and lived in an elegant brownstone or townhouse in New York City. Since he was financially independent, the police always had to beg him to solve their most difficult cases. Philo Vance mostly spoke of literature and music and smoked expensive cigarettes. The way he spoke was reminiscent of the elites of the 1930s.

The character Philo Vance was unrealistic because most people were very poor at the time. Precisely for this reason, Philo Vance, paradoxically, became very successful during the Great Depression. Many people in this era wanted to escape the uncomfortable reality if they could.

Thanks to his success, Wright became very wealthy himself. He moved to an expensive penthouse and loved to spend his money. His lifestyle was similar to that of Philo Vance. Wright also became addicted to cannabis . He died in New York on April 11, 1939.

In addition to his successful work as a crime writer, Wright wrote an extensive introduction and notes for an anthology, The World's Great Detective Stories (1928), which are still considered important by critics of the genre today. Although his essay is now partially obsolete, it remains a critical focus for the genre. Wright wrote 20 rules that any good detective story should obey. A detective novel, for example, should only be about murder, otherwise the whole thing would be a waste of time.

In the early 1930s, Wright also wrote a series of short stories for Warner Brothers . These stories formed the basis for twelve short films. Each of these was about 20 minutes long. They were published around 1930. Particularly noteworthy is The Skull Murder Mystery , which was Wright's intense plot structure. This film is noteworthy because it showed Chinese characters in an anti-racist manner. However, none of these scripts has ever been published. It is doubtful that they still exist today.

Short films were particularly popular in the 1930s. Hollywood shot hundreds of them. With a few exceptions, they are now forgotten, even reference books do not mention them.

Publications (selection)

• The Fall of Margaret Odell. Berlin: Ullstein, 1931.

• Death in the casino . Goldmann's crime novels. Munich: W. Goldmann Verlag, 1951.
• The dragon pond . Goldmann's crime novels. Munich: W. Goldmann Vlg., 1951.
  • Murder files Drachensee - A classic detective novel . German Translated by Leni Sobez. Edited by Egon Flörchinger. Munich: Heyne, 1973.
  • The Dragon murder case - DuMont's crime library . Cologne: DuMont Verlag, 2003.
• The Canary Murder Case . From the American. by Manfred Allié. Ostfildern: DuMont Reiseverlag, 2002.
• Greene murder file . German Translated by Leni Sobez. Edited by Egon Flörchinger. Munich: Heyne, 1975.
• Record of murder bishop . German Translated by Marfa Berger. Munich: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, 1972.
• Scotchterrier murder files. A classic detective novel. German by Leni Sobez. Munich; Heyne, 1976.
• The Benson Murder Case . Cologne: Dumont, 2000.

Web links

• Philo Vance novels at Project Gutenberg Australia (English)
• Literature by and about SS Van Dine in the catalog of the German National Library
• SS Van Dine in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• SS Van Dine in the Notable Names Database (English) (with photo)

• Works by SS Van Dine in the Gutenberg-DE project