Louis Auchincloss

A tale of two perfect-for-each people from two wildly different worlds.

Dirk and Martha Lawrence are apparently not the happiest couple in New York, despite her millions of dollars and his fairly successful mystery-writing career. Martha asks for a secretive meeting to get Ellery Queen's advice because Dirk's violent jealousy is causing problems in her life—but Dirk shows up suspecting the worst and punches Ellery into unconsciousness. Dirk apologizes the next day, telling the story of how his father had killed his mother's lover, thereby causing his over-reaction. Ellery's secretary and inamorata Nikki Porter urges him to stay involved in the situation and Nikki moves in with the Lawrences to keep an eye on things (and act as Dirk's secretary on a stalled book). Nikki soon reports that Martha actually is having a series of clandestine meetings with romantic actor Van Harrison. The meetings are arranged with innocuous envelopes that look like advertising, but with Martha's name and address written in scarlet typewriter ink. Also, the envelopes contain only a day, time and a sequential letter of the alphabet—a code that is soon linked to a New York Guidebook. By the time the meetings have progressed from "A" through to "W", Dirk has found out about the affair and followed Martha to Van's home in the suburb of Darien. He breaks in, confronts the pair and shoots them both, seriously wounding Martha, who nearly dies. Van Harrison has just enough time before he dies to leave a dying clue—using his own blood, he writes an "X", then a "Y" on the wall, and dies. Ellery must consider the significance of this dying message and finally solves it, just as Dirk's murder trial is about to conclude. After Ellery gets a private conversation with the judge, a criminal then receives justice.'''

"Her Infinite Variety" spins the rollicking tale of the devilish yet wholly beguiling Clara Hoyt through the tumultuous, heady times of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. From the time she enthralls the first of her husbands, Clara charts a wildly entertaining course to the inner sanctum of New York's aristocracy and to the boardrooms of the publishing world.

The intense fascination with the golden age of Newport, Rhode Island, where the wealthy families of turn-of-the-century America built enormous mansions and socialized for the summer, has never been stronger. In this evocative new book, a distinguished writer and a renowned photographer collaborate to give us a unique vision of that gilded past. Deborah Turbeville's stunning photographs convey the glory and the mystery of some of the great estates, inside and out. Adding an historical angle, Louis Auchincloss gives keen and witty observations of society, its leaders and architects, and social customs of the period.

This volume "examines the lives of New York's 'acceptable' families, the privileged wealthy, during the period 1880-1920. The author uses his close connections to their descendants and other research to tell lively anecdotal histories of the business-dominated, pseudo-aristocracy in democratic America." The Vanderbilt family was highly prominent during the 1800s due to the family patriarch Cornelius Vanderbilt, who created railroad and shipping empires. His descendants went on to build great Fifth Avenue mansions, Newport, Rhode Island summer cottages, the famous Biltmore House and various other exclusive homes. The family members were the leaders of the high society scene and the Gilded Age, until the early 1900s, when the ten great Fifth Avenue mansions were torn down and fellow Vanderbilt homes were sold as museums and the like. This work consists of group portraits among its illustrations of three generations of the Vanderbilt family's conspicuous outward appearances and architectural indulgences.

" ... The tangle of art and business, idealism and venality, ambition and the yearning for love, is deftly unraveled ..."--Page 2 of cover.