Download or read book The Kidnap Murder Case (a Philo Vance Detective Story) written by S. S. Van Dine and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2016-01-18 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This early work by S. S. Van Dine was originally published in 1936 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introduction. 'The Kidnap Murder Case' is one of Van Dine's novels of crime and mystery. S. S. Van Dine was born Willard Huntington Wright in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1888. He attended St. Vincent College, Pomona College and Harvard University, but failed to graduate, leaving to cultivate contacts he had made in the literary world. At the age of twenty-one, Wright began his professional writing career as literary editor of the Los Angeles Times. In 1926, Wright published his first S. S. Van Dine novel, The Benson Murder Case. Wright went on to write eleven more mysteries. The first few books about his upper-class amateur sleuth, Philo Vance, were so popular that Wright became wealthy for the first time in his life. His later books declined in popularity as the reading public's tastes in mystery fiction changed, but during the late twenties and early thirties his work was very successful.