Tuesday, December 21, 2021

Emma Lathen's Double, Double, Oil and Trouble


There's been a couple from the John Putnam Thatcher series featured lately at Major Yammerton's, which reminded me I had one I haven't ever read. (Or maybe I have, but it's been a while & I've forgotten. Good enough!)

John Putnam Thatcher is a high-powered executive at Sloan Guaranty Bank on Wall Street. He's in Switzerland for other business reasons when he's called in to make a ransom payoff; Davidson Wylie, a key employee at Macklin Drilling, one of Sloan's clients, was kidnapped in Turkey by 'Black Tuesday.' Macklin will be paying, and Thatcher is asked to hand over the money to a numbered Swiss bank account.

But Wylie isn't released. What went wrong? And who is Black Tuesday? Palestinians? Eco-terrorists? (It is an oil company under attack.) 

It's an important moment for Macklin: they're in the process of bidding for a North Sea oil site off the coast of Scotland; a German company is their main rival. Wylie was crucial to the bid.

Three weeks later, after some half-hearted negotiations, Wylie is released. By then the bid has been decided, and Macklin won even without Wylie's presence. Wylie is terrified and refuses to help police track down his kidnappers. He flies off to Houston (Macklin's headquarters) for some R&R, but is murdered a few days later.

There's another body--this one in London--before Thatcher solves this one. Pretty fun.

This comes out in 1978 when North Sea oil and OPEC are important issues. (That's assuming they aren't always.) But Emma Lathen isn't a writer of political thrillers, or not exactly, instead owing more to Golden Age mystery conventions, and we've met all the possible suspects by about page 40. (Emma Lathen also isn't Emma Lathen. It's a pseudonym for two high-powered professional women: one a New York lawyer; the other an economics professor.) This is the seventeenth in the series. There were seven more to come.

As it is the world of high finance and oil exploration, it moves around: Switzerland, Istanbul, Greece, Houston, New York, London, Scotland facing the North Sea. It was amusing to see Houston in the 70s, where I was for my undergraduate years. (Though this would be a little before my time.) 

And all that traveling means I get to count it for:

Though the chat between the Istanbul cops was pretty entertaining, I think we'll go with that opening scene in the world of Swiss bankers...

9 comments:

  1. never heard of it, but i'll have to read it if i can find it as i spent a good portion of my life in the oil field being as i'm a geologist and there's not much else for them to do if they don't have advanced degrees or know someone in the industry even if i did end working on the floor pulling slips half the time anyhow... plus it sounds kind of interesting also...

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    1. The authors know more about finance than the oil industry, I think, but it's a pretty good mystery. I've read a couple out of the series, but by no means all.

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  2. Were it not for you and Major Yammerton, I would not have heard of this series either. It sounds very good and like a good way to time travel back to the political and financial world of the last half of the last century. So much has changed, at least on the surface. Human motivations haven’t changed at all, I’d wager.

    I would love to see a publisher reissue some of these “lost” crime fiction novels of the 20th century. I’m currently tracking down some Margaret Maron books for my mom and when they fall out of print, they can be very hard to find!

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    1. Sometimes they get reissued but you never know. The Brits seem to do better at reissuing.

      Most of my old mysteries like this come from charity sales at the University of Toronto in the fall. 6 for $5 (Canadian!) Except they haven't held the sales the last two years so my pile is running low...

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  3. I think about doing the European Reading Challenge every year. You've done well with it this year, I think.

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    1. I find it a fun one. It's a good reason to poke around!

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  4. This one was just okay to me because the familiar series characters aren’t around – bon vivant Charlie Trinkam, cautious Ev Gabler and the formidable Miss Corsa. But the scene where Thatcher is delivering the ransom was suspenseful. What I like about Emma Lathen is her assumption that it's rare among specialists to understand deeply both their specialty and management of human beings. Her stories are often about the quirks of organizational behavior brought on by changes like success, growth, or management shuffles.

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    1. Yeah, there's less of Trinkam and Miss Corsa and almost no Ev Gabler in this one, which is kind of a bummer.

      She (They?) are great at seeing how actual people interact with organizational issues. It's a definite rare strength.

      I need to figure out how to get hold of some more.

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