Van Dine

Van Dine, who created some of the most brilliant mysteries of the genre.

Van Dine’s first Philo Vance mystery, “The Benson Murder Case” and Cornell Woolrich’s suspense-filled, “Deadline at Dawn,” and our own Library of Congress’s Crime Classics program has reissued novels as varied as Rudolph Fisher’s pioneering African American mystery, “The Conjure-Man Dies,” and Hillary Waugh’s genre-establishing police procedural, “Last Seen Wearing.”

“The Kidnap Murder Case” is real, simon-pure Van Dine, and that should be good enough for anybody.

Van Dine, whose cosmopolitan Philo Vance is a more effete version of Lord Peter Wimsey; Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled “Red Harvest,” which features the Continental Op; and the gangster classic, W.R.

Van Dine, he adds that it invites the reader to employ “a high degree of logical reasoning.”