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 June 23, the New York Times reported. She was 78.
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| Jane Stanton Hitchcock | |
Hitchcock's mother was Joan Stanton, a 1940s-era radio star who played Lois Lane on the radio version of The Adventures of Superman. Her father, Arthur Stanton, who adopted her when she was 9, had made a fortune importing Volkswagen cars after World War II. The Times wrote that the Stantons "were known for their elaborate parties, where Leonard Bernstein might be found at the piano. For Jane's 21st birthday, Neil Simon composed a sketch." At 29, Jane Stanton married William Mellon Hitchcock, an heir of the wealthy industrialist and Treasury secretary Andrew Mellon, "mixing her newish money with his gilded-age wealth."
Hitchcock drew from this background for her work, beginning with a series of films and Off Broadway plays, but it was when she began mixing social satire with murder that she found her voice. "Murder concentrates the mind," she told the New York Times in 2002.
Her first novel, Trick of the Eye (1992), was praised for its "crackling dialogue that expresses character while steadily, stealthily advancing the plot" by the New York Times Book Review. Her other books include The Witches' Hammer (1994), Social Crimes (2002), and One Dangerous Lady (2005).
In an interview, Jonathan Burnham, 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."
Former media executive Lynn de Rothschild observed that Hitchcock's books "slammed the hypocrisies and excesses of the world in which she was born, but in the funniest way... she never betrayed anyone. She just murdered them off."
In 2009, however, Hitchcock's fifth book, Mortal Friends, was published and some people did take offense. She was by then married to Jim Hoagland, the Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent, editor, and columnist for the Washington Post, and this was her first book set in D.C., where she lost a number of friends after its release.
Hitchcock also spent several years trying to "untangle the transgressions of her mother's longtime accountant, Kenneth Starr (no relation to the independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton)," the Times wrote. "She had been told by her mother's gardener that Mr. Starr was siphoning off tens of millions of dollars from Mrs. Stanton, who had turned her $80 million inheritance over to him after her husband's death in 1987." The district attorney's office eventually found that Starr had been pilfering from clients such as Al Pacino, Carly Simon, and Uma Thurman.
Hitchcock's mother died in 2009, and a month later, the publication of Mortal Friends and its fallout left Hitchcock feeling battered, as did the ongoing investigation of her mother's accountant. She found solace in online poker and her final book, Bluff (2019), was set in that world and won the Dashiell Hammett Prize for Literary Excellence, given by the North American branch of the International Association of Crime Writers.
"You know in the Bible where it says it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven?" she wrote in Mortal Friends. "Well, that's why rich people invented loopholes."