"This planet has — or rather had — a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."- Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, 1979)
Emma Lathen was the nom de plume
of economist Mary Jane Latsis and economic analyst Martha Henissart,
businesswomen who switched branches in the early 1960s and exploited their
insight knowledge for a string of mystery novels that ran well into the 90s. I've
read various opinions on Lathen's work and the main consensus among connoisseurs
gives the impression that their earlier books were the best, but otherwise,
were prone to churning out uneven and sometimes needlessly complex mysteries – with the
main appeal being the furnishing of the plot with corporate entities and
financial shenanigans.
I was hesitant to dive head first into a
disappointment and I may have hold Lathen off a bit longer, where it not for an
old post on the GADGroup by Tom Schantz (from Rue Morgue Press infamy!) giving
an honest defense on behalf of a pair of writers who did give me
the impression of being genuine purveyors of whodunits. And after all, how bad
can they have been, if Tom and Enid had to fight over who got first dibs on a
new Lathen back when they first came out?
It still took Lathen weeks months
years to reach the peak of Mt.-to-be-Read, but all of a sudden, there they were
and I began to work my way through Ashes to Ashes (1971) – twelfth in
the John Putnam Thatcher series.
The St. Bernadette's Parents League has
been forcing a wedge between the community of Flensburg and the church over a
bankrupt parochial school that a real-estate developer has made a multi-million
dollar offer on the land – backed by a mortgage from Thatcher's Sloan Guarantee
Trust. The league is determined to safe the school for the community, but their
opposition is stubborn and the situation was heading for a stalemate.
Until Francis P. Omara, owner of a local funeral
parlor, was relieved from his duty as the figurehead of the Parents League with
a butcher's mallet and his murder throws a town already in uproar in disorder. Probably
the most memorable scene is how a call for modernization of Catholicism by
distributing birth control pills – resulting in an out-and-out riot. I was very
tempted to title this post "It's clobbering time!"
Anyway, while Ashes to Ashes
delivered on the business aspect of the story, it’s was not enough to carry the
story on its own and I did keep losing interest in the plot, which was everything
from mind blowing. Not even with a few bomb scares and an actual explosion thrown
into the mix. There were clues that Thatcher explained, but they're hardly worthy
of the epithet "America's Agatha Christie." If you want to draw a comparison,
I would say Rex Stout. To put it simple, I found myself unable to care about
most of what happened in this book, but individual opinions may differ – as they
tend to do on Lathen.
But let the reader be warned: modern
sensibilities might be strained or even disturbed by certain passages that rhapsodizes
Wall Street (something they apparently do in every book) and depicts bankers in
the act of protecting piles of money that smells fishy. ;)
And I will give one of their earlier efforts a shot in near future.
I think the Rex Stout comparison definitely is more apt, as far as plotting and general milieu go.
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