Books By S.S. Van Dine, Judith John, Christopher Semtner - Author

S.S. Van Dine was the crime-novel pseudonym of Willard Huntington Wright (1888–1939), an American journalist, critic and novelist. He wrote scathing book reviews as literary editor for the Los Angeles Times, and would later publish unconventional and avant-garde work by the likes of D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad and Ezra Pound for the magazine The Smart Set. Yet it was as a writer of detective fiction that he found financial success. His series of novels featuring amateur sleuth and art lover Philo Vance, the first of which was The Benson Murder Case (1926), were so popular that they also lead to movies and radio, and prevented Wright from ever returning to the less lucrative writing of which he would have been more proud. Judith John (glossary) is a writer and editor specializing in literature and history. A former secondary school English Language and Literature teacher, she has subsequently worked as an editor on major educational projects, including English A: Literature for the Pearson International