What are these “Twenty Rules” Flex and Herds keep referring to on Death of the Reader? S.S. Van Dine was known originally as a zealous literary critic by the name of Willard Huntington Wright. After adopting the Van Dine pseudonym, he made sure that the game of detective fiction was played his way, and by his rules, with none of those damned tropes he saw other authors using. Listen in to hear us break down the full set of rules he wrote that defined his detective stories.