Sad news. Jane Stanton Hitchcock: R.I.P. I really liked her mysteries. So clever.
Jane Stanton Hitchcock, "a daughter of privilege who skewered the foibles of her tribe in a series of addictive crime novels, and who then uncovered a real-life crime when her mother was swindled by her accountant, died on June 23 at her home in Washington, D.C. She was 78."
From the NYT:
Her first novel, “Trick of the Eye” (1992), involved a trompe l’oeil artist named Faith Crowell and the unsolved murder of a long-dead Long Island debutante. Bruce Allen, assessing the novel in The New York Times Book Review, said that Ms. Hitchcock “knows how to write crackling dialogue that expresses character while steadily, stealthily advancing the plot.”
“Even if you guess the ending,” he wrote, “you will enjoy Faith Crowell’s compulsive fascination with ‘the fashion of making things appear to be what they are not.’”
In an interview, Jonathan Burnham, Ms. Hitchcock’s longtime book editor, said: “Nobody of her background wrote about their world the way she did — that New York high society world that has virtually disappeared. She managed to send it up in elegant satire. It slipped down very easily.”
From IACW North America:
It is with great sadness that we report the passing of Jane Stanton Hitchcock, multiple Hammett nominee. Her novel Trick of the Eye was one of the 1992 finalists for the Hammett award along with Donald Westlake, Walter Mosley, Alice Hoffman, and Daniel Woodrell.
In 2019, however, she won the award outright for her novel Bluff, which drew on her personal expertise as a professional level poker player. Humorous crime novels are quite rare and even rarer are those that hold up years later. Seek out a copy of Bluff if you have not read it and read it again to learn something about writing.Her entertaining satire of the upper classes drew on her personal knowledge as the adoptive daughter of a major tycoon and a popular actress. Jane herself was a delightful person, witty, intelligent, and, of course, sophisticated.
Linda Fairstein who informed us of Jane’s passing, mentioned “Jane, who was one of my best friends for 40 years, was immensely proud of the honor of being awarded the Hammett.” Her obituary in the New York Times even mentioned her pride in this achievement. She gave the impression to me that she didn’t quite understand just how talented she was."
