Emma Lathen

TYPES OF PLOT: Amateur sleuth; cozy; thriller

PRINCIPAL SERIES: John Thatcher, 1961-1997

Contribution

Emma Lathen is a pseudonym used by the writing team of Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Henissart. Latsis, an economist, and Henissart, a lawyer, looked to their professional journals and activities for ideas and information to create the Emma Lathen novels, which make a witty contribution to the tradition of the amateur sleuth whose specialized knowledge leads to solving crimes. Even readers unfamiliar with the language or activities of the world of high finance can enjoy the explorations of the workings of Wall Street and the financial shenanigans that lead to murder.

Lathen’s ability to condense the complicated world of corporate finance into a recognizable form for the uninitiated while framing it in the tradition of the Golden Age of mystery and crime fiction was a novelty in the early 1960s. The mixture of business and murder allowed Lathen to address various social issues (and political ones in the Ben Safford series). It also provided rich fodder for expanding the dimensions of the traditional mystery novel. Lathen received the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger Award for best crime fiction in 1967 for Murder Against the Grain, the Ellery Queen Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1983, and the Agatha Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1997.

Biography

Mary Jane Latsis and Martha Hennisart, the two personalities behind Emma Lathen, first met in the 1950s as graduate students at Wellesley College. They resumed their friendship in 1960 and began a literary collaboration that would span nearly four decades and produce more than two dozen novels. Latsis was born in Chicago and studied economics at Wellesley. She later moved to New York to work in corporate finance. Hennisart studied law and worked for the Central Intelligence Agency and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome before returning to Wellesley to teach.

A common interest in crime fiction and a similar dissatisfaction with the quality and range of contemporary works in the genre led them to form a literary partnership in 1960. As they both worked in the corporate world, Latsis and Hennisart adopted a pseudonym to avoid complications with business clients who might worry that their private affairs would be material for their mysteries. They devised the name Emma Lathen, comprising components of each name. Emma approximates the “M” from Mary and the “Ma” from Martha, while Lathen comes from the “Lat” of Latsis and the “Hen” of Hennissart. Later novels appeared under a second pseudonym, R. B. Dominic.

Latsis and Hennisart divided the labor by writing alternate chapters of their books—Latsis with a pen and a legal pad and Hennisart with a manual typewriter. When a manuscript was complete, they reviewed it for inconsistencies before producing a final draft. Their first book, Banking on Death, was published in 1961 to wide critical acclaim and introduced the mystery world to the character of John Putnam Thatcher, a corporate financial officer and amateur sleuth and the hero of their long-running Thatcher series of crime novels. Murder Sunny Side Up, the first in a second crime series featuring Congressman Ben Safford, appeared in 1968.

After the pair achieved greater prominence, Latsis and Hennisart gave up their corporate jobs and purchased a house together in New Hampshire, where they spent part of every year writing and hiking in the White Mountains. Their identities eventually became known, but Latsis and Hennisart remained intensely private about their personal lives and avoided public attention and interviews.

Latsis died in 1997 at seventy, shortly before the publication of Shark Out of Water (1997), the twenty-fourth novel in the Thatcher series. Following her partner's passing, Hennisart continued publishing under the pen name Emma Lathen, writing three screenplays—A Place for Murder Emma Lathen (2018), Accounting for Murder (2018), and Murder Makes the Wheels Go Round (2018). She also published the Elizabeth Thatcher Murder series, which features John Putnam Thatcher's daughter Elizabeth in Political Murder (2016) and Dot Com Murder (2016).

Analysis

A steady diet of Emma Lathen novels may not qualify readers for business degrees, but it would be a highly entertaining way to be instructed in the ways of the financial world. Since the first novel, Banking on Death, introduced the powerful senior vice president of the Sloan Guaranty Trust, the third largest bank in the world, delighted readers have followed John Thatcher and his efficient and knowledgeable band of associates into the intricacies of the fast-food business, cocoa trading, Greek and Puerto Rican politics, grain business with the Soviet Union, the second-home development industry, hockey games, the Winter Olympics, the auto industry, college boards, and the development of tomato hybrids.

Complex and potentially confusing subjects such as these are so skillfully woven into the classic pattern of detective novels that Lathen has been acclaimed as the “best living American writer of detective stories” by the writer C. P. Snow and “the most important woman in American mystery” by the Los Angeles Times. The Lathen novels are indeed classically constructed, though not so much in the tradition of American hard-boiled fiction, with its dark underside, but rather more in British Golden Age fiction tradition. The pattern of such detective novels is also the pattern of classic comedy. Defined broadly, the ritual pattern starts with a society in disorder; the underlying impulse driving the plot is the need to restore harmony in the community, a function that, in a detective novel, is undertaken by the detective figure.

This underlying pattern structures a Lathen novel in which John Thatcher is drawn, sometimes against his will, into investigating a murder. Because the Lathen specialty is to show some aspect of the world of big business gone awry, Thatcher is particularly well qualified to put together pieces of financial information from various sources. Thatcher becomes embroiled in a case not only because he represents the Sloan and its investments but also because he has considerable experience with people’s behavior and motivations and because he is curious. Having carefully observed and weighed the significance of what he has witnessed, he has a moment of insight when the pieces fall together; thereupon, he puts the mighty forces of the Sloan to work, gathering more information to validate his insight. The cause of the disorder, the murderer, is discovered and rooted out, and social order is restored. After the guilty party is disposed of, Thatcher and the rest of the innocents gather to thrash out the details of the complex causes that led to the murder.

Lathen novels, while developing in such a classic pattern, depict a wide variety of people, classes, and issues. Lathen plays scrupulously fair with readers by limiting the number of suspects and by providing enough information for readers to draw their own conclusions. Though the criminal element is usually a member of an elite class, the canvas of a Lathen novel can be very broad; its community can be any part of the world, any level of society affected by a particular business, because the invisible thread that ties the whole world together is money. Lathen takes an unalloyed pleasure in the vagaries of money, in its power to travel to far-flung places, to seep into every crevice and crack of political and social institutions, to tangle together races, cultures, and ideologies in its universal web. Therefore, every novel begins with a specific reference to Wall Street, the heart of any big business:

Above all, Wall Street is power. The talk is of stocks and bonds, of contracts and bills of lading, of gold certificates and wheat futures, but it is talk that sends fleets steaming to distant oceans, that determines the fate of new African governments, that closes mining camps in the Chibougamou.

Lathen invariably incorporates vignettes of the common folk affected by financial upheavals, the plucky, hardworking men and women whose hopes, dreams, and livelihoods hang in the balance. When an arrogant member of the privileged class decides in desperation to protect his status in his community by randomly poisoning the batter mix used in a national fried-chicken franchise, for example, the Sloan becomes involved because it has twelve million dollars at stake. Lathen also takes her readers, however, to Willoughby, New Jersey, to see how this devastates Vern Ackers and Dodie Ackers, whose life savings, invested in the Chicken Tonight franchise, appears to be lost when the nation in a panic quits buying chicken in any form (Murder to Go, 1969). When the mighty Vandam Nursery and Seed Company’s patent for the find of the century, a biennial tomato, is challenged and an injunction placed on their mail-order catalog (Green Grow the Dollars, 1982), a spry sixty-year-old woman in Shelburne, Vermont, desolately complains: “It’s as if that catalog is the only thing that can convince me that spring really will come.”

Though the main characters in a Lathen novel are the affluent and powerful of the financial world, they are the ones who come in for some of Lathen’s most ironic commentary. Thatcher, after all, is senior vice president of the Sloan, highly placed but not at the top. His attitude toward the president of the bank, Bradford Withers, is to hope devoutly that he is away sailing or exploring exotic countries, or if he must take an interest in the bank, that he will limit himself to behaving graciously at social functions, the only service his class, education, and personality allow him to provide for the Sloan. In Lathen’s world, the most visible people at the top of a hierarchy are dangerously ignorant of the realities of the wealth that keeps them at the top. When Thatcher wants information, he knows better than to bother with figureheads:

Going straight to the top is a stratagem best left to amateurs. The president and the chairman of the board of Standard Foods resembled the Joint Chiefs of Staff—too wise, too farseeing and too remote for the nuts-and-bolts working of their complex apparatus.

Thatcher’s colleagues, though admirably competent, tend to be droll personalities. Thatcher’s friend Tom Robichaux, for example, is a member of an investment firm that does business with the Sloan, a man with gourmet tastes and a firm grasp of money matters. Yet his private life becomes a social minefield for Thatcher whenever they meet for lunch, as Thatcher tries desperately to remember the name of Robichaux’s latest wife and what stage of which divorce proceedings he is suffering through now. Everett Gabler, a health nut with a poor digestive system, can be counted on to disapprove of any but the most conservative ventures; Charlie Trinkam, head of the Utilities Department and a confirmed bachelor, can be counted on to find an outstandingly attractive and colorful single woman as a source of esoteric business information.

Thatcher himself is often outmaneuvered by the women in his life. He has to pull himself together to assert his authority with his unflappable secretary, Miss Corsa, who disapproves of almost anything that interferes with his getting through the pile of paperwork always on his desk. He is equally helpless in the face of demands from his daughter Laura, who learned much from her mother about getting Thatcher to do what he would rather not, which most often consists of attending glittery cultural or social functions. The subtle overturning of the expected hierarchy at the Sloan and the tug-of-war between generations, frequent motifs in Lathen’s work, are ageless comic conventions.

Since the Sloan Guaranty Trust is the third largest bank in the world and, therefore, a significant force in the world economy, even novels with a specific setting—such as a small hospital in A Stitch in Time (1968) or St. Bernadette’s Parochial School in Ashes to Ashes (1971)—are not confined to one locale. Thatcher may be called on to travel to faraway places such as Greece or Switzerland. Even when Thatcher is not actually in another part of the world, Lathen shows the reader how the mighty resources of the Sloan can pick up the paper trail of money wherever it goes.

Lathen’s novels are traditionally conservative, upholding social order and stability. This is reflected in her characters’ financial dealings. Admirable characters treat money with professional respect and integrity; the criminals, on the other hand, are those unhappy creatures who manipulate it with unrealistic, desperate hopes of making it perform miraculous tricks on their behalf. Lathen’s specialty is the light touch with which she depicts the very large forces that impinge on the lives of individuals as they dream and scheme to find their good life.

Death Shall Overcome

Because to bankers, money is the root of everything, including but not limited to evil, Thatcher, the Sloan, and Wall Street often are embroiled in political and social issues of international proportions. In Death Shall Overcome (1966), the murderer tries to cover an ordinary color-blind case of embezzlement by inciting the latent racists on Wall Street to oppose the election of a black millionaire to the New York Stock Exchange. So successful is the camouflage that Thatcher, infuriated by Simpson, a publicity-seeking black activist planning a kneel-in media event at the Sloan, mobilizes the Sloan Glee Club. Thatcher welcomes the protesters with a “ringing speech which placed the Sloan so far in the vanguard of the civil rights movement that it left Simpson looking like a Ku Klux Klansman”; a chorus of seven hundred Sloan voices then thunders out Civil War songs.

The Longer the Thread

In The Longer the Thread (1971), Thatcher finds a series of suspicious accidents in the operation of a failing Puerto Rican clothing manufacturer funded by Sloan Guaranty Trust. With three million dollars of his bank’s money at stake and with corpses piling up, Thatcher struggles to uncover a pattern to the violence and to determine who stands to gain the most by it. Lathen employs considerable wit in the novel, as she does in all the Thatcher mysteries. Some early chapters have titles such as “Bias Binding,” “Following a Pattern,” “Double Seams,” “Sewing the Wind,” and “Pinking Shears”; chapters in which Thatcher is close to discovering the criminal are titled “Gather at the Neck” and “Stitch, Stitch, Stitch.”

Shark Out of Water

In Shark Out of Water, Thatcher travels to Gdansk, Poland, to ferret out new investment opportunities for Sloan Guaranty Trust and, as usual, stumbles on a murder. The city serves as the headquarters of a European consortium called the Baltic Area Development Association (BADA), which governs its delegates with a heavy and corrupt hand.

When BADA’s chief of staff turns up dead after alleging widespread irregularities within the group, Thatcher senses foul play. In his traditionally calm but effective manner, Thatcher helps the Gdansk police navigate the rough waters of international finance to determine who might benefit most from the death of the would-be whistleblower.

Each Lathen novel provides a happy blend of the familiar and the predictable with the fresh and informative, delivered with wit and good humor. As long as John Thatcher was around to keep an eye on the “endearingly childlike innocents” on Wall Street who always expect “the good, the beautiful, the true and the profitable,” and as long as Lathen was there to explain why a surefire money-making proposition is not, her fans could rest assured that, in mystery fiction at least, someone was watching the bank.

Principal Series Characters:

• John Putnam Thatcher, the senior vice president of the Sloan Guaranty Trust, was born in Sunapee, New Hampshire, and attended Harvard University. A widower, Thatcher maintains cordial relations with his daughter, Laura, and his two sons and their families. Having had much experience with money matters and people, he is cautious, contemplative, and conservative and enjoys investigating murder mysteries precisely because he dislikes chaos.
• Ben Safford is a democratic congressman from Ohio whose insider knowledge of national politics serves him well when he more than occasionally becomes embroiled in murder investigations.

Bibliography

Bakerman, Jane S. “A View from Wall Street: Social Criticism in the Mystery Novels of Emma Lathen.” The Armchair Detective, vol. 9, June 1976, pp. 213-217.

Dubose, Martha Hailey, with Margaret Caldwell Thomas. Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists. St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2000.

Keating, H. R. F., ed. Whodunit? A Guide to Crime, Suspense, and Spy Fiction. London: Windward, 1982.

Mahoney, Mary Kay. “Wall Street Broker John Putnam Thatcher.” Clues (Fall-Winter, 2001): 73-82.

Nyren, Neil. "Emma Lathen: A Crime Reader's Guide to the Classics: Rediscovering the Queen(s) of Business Crime" Crime Reads, 12 Dec. 2018, crimereads.com/emma-lathen-a-crime-readers-guide-to-the-classics. Accessed 20 July 2024.

Storhoff, Gary. “Emma Lathen.” In Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Modern, edited by Kathleen Gregory Klein. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994.

Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel—A History. 3rd ed. New York: Mysterious Press, 1993.

Thomas, Robert McG. “M. J. Latsis, Seventy, Emma Lathen Writing Team Collaborator.” The New York Times, Oct. 1997, p. D23.