Alias S. S. Van Dine

John Loughery's book was a big seller when it came out and there are many used copies available in the resale market, but in other ways it has been unjustly forgotten, and that's a real shame. Loughery has been damned by detective story fans as a man who didn't himself care for mysteries, and preferred "S S Van Dine" under his real name, Willard Huntington Wright. Wright's activities as art writer, theorist, editor and all-around American modernist are interesting indeed, and I don't blame Loughery for making so much of them. Could any of the members of today's MWA boast such a wideranging career? And Wright's brother was indeed one of the more interesting painters of his day. You'd think a book that gives equal attention to both aspects of this strange career would be a "win-win," as they say, affair, and yet even I, sympathetic to Loughery and in general admiring of his work here, come away uneasy with the results. I think that for dramatic effect, Loughery exaggerates to some extent Van Dine's fall from popular favor, his money problems, the last years of his life, and even the so-called decline in the Philo Vance novels: all seem written up in the most lurid light, and seemingly for moral reasons, to show that you can't be a pr*ck your whole life and expect to carry on without recriminations. Yes, Loughery really despises Wright/Van Dine, and maybe that approach has worked for some biographies, but for this one, it is a pity indeed, for I think we wind up feeling that the biographer has missed a wonderful chance to give us a well-rounded picture, because he got too hung up on Wright's flaws as a human being, a husband and a father. Folks claim the early Vance novels were the best ones, and it is sad in a way that Van Dine wound up writing novels in honor of Gracie Allen and Sonia Henie. When you call your book "The Gracie Allen Murder Case" it becomes obvious you've sold your assto the movie studios, and yet something could have been made of this phase of Wright/Van Dine, those books weren't so awful.