S.S. Van Dine: The Man Who Didn’t Want to Write Murder Mysteries

He was born Willard Huntington Wright in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1888, and grew up in Santa Monica, California as the son of a hotel proprietor. Willy had a brother named Stanton Macdonald-Wright, who is considered one of the very first American abstract artists and co-founded Synchromism, an art movement that combined color and sound that jump-started the avant-garde movement. Stanton was pretty well-renowned and in fact, he painted a portrait of his brother that you can see at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. 

But enough about Willard’s painter brother! Willard himself was something of an autodidact, even though he went to a few colleges (including Harvard) that he never graduated from, but somehow was able to become a literary editor at the Los Angeles Times at just 21 years old. He apparently wrote book reviews shitting all the poor author’s work, a personality trait that would alienate him from others for much of his life. 

Willard moved to the Big Apple in 1911 and was an editor of a literary magazine called The Smart Set, where he published stories and poems by big shots like D.H. Lawrence and William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pounds. He was eventually fired for his provocative choices in the work he chose to print, and a couple years later in 1916, he wrote his debut novel, called The Man of Promise.

Like his brother, Willard was a big art guy. He went to Europe in 1913 and wrote about the Synchromism movement that gave the art attention stateside. He continued to write about art, even getting props from Georgia O’Keeffe. By 1917, though, he had alienated a lot of his writer pals by not supporting America joining the Allies in the First World War, and that led to a stretch of poverty, which led to a stretch of illness that he needed a long time to recover from. He began to devour the detective fiction he used to pan in his reviews, and even wrote an article called “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories” that occupies a place next to Ronald Knox’s Ten Commandments.

Willard published The Benson Murder Case in 1926 under the name S.S. Van Dine, and along with his next two books, Willard suddenly found himself among the bestselling writers in the country. 

This newfound success was actually a blow to his precious ego, as he was plenty uncomfortable with being a part of mass market genre fiction as opposed to a big-shot art critic with literary pretensions. Hollywood liked him just fine, though, and many of his novels were adapted to movies. 

Willard Huntington Wright passed away in 1939 when he was just 50 years old due to a heart condition that his drinking and cocaine use did not do any favors for. The intellectual who had once looked down on detective fiction was one of its greatest successes. He helped define the Golden Age detective story in America and for a short time, his fictional creation Philo Vance was just as recognized as any other famous detective, including Sherlock Holmes. 

Willard was a pretty compelling figure in an age stuffed with quality detective fiction writers like Agatha Christie and Margery Allingham and R. Austin Freeman and G.D.H. and Margaret Cole. One hundred years later, The Benson Murder Case offers readers an intriguing look at the murder mystery genre when it was just becoming a cultural force.

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Cover image credit: Map is from the public domain per Wikimedia Commons. Author photo is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

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