Jane Stanton Hitchcock, who drew on her experiences in high society for a series of crime novels, has died at 78, the New York Times reports.
Hitchcock was born in Manhattan; her mother was Joan Alexander, the actor who played Lois Lane in the radio show The Adventures of Superman. Alexander was a victim of Kenneth Ira Starr, the money manager who was convicted in 2010 of running a Ponzi scheme with his clients’ money; Hitchcock helped uncover the crime.
Hitchcock was educated at Sarah Lawrence College and made her writing debut as the screenwriter for the 1974 film Our Time, directed by Peter Hyams and starring Pamela Sue Martin and Parker Stevenson.
In 1992, she published her first novel, Trick of the Eye, about an artist who is hired to paint a ballroom for an elderly woman whose daughter was murdered years before. She followed that up two years later with The Witches’ Hammer and went on to write four more novels: Social Crimes, One Dangerous Lady, Mortal Friends, and, most recently, Bluff, inspired by her love of poker.
In a 2019 interview with Criminal Element, Hitchcock talked about satirizing the upper crust in her novels, saying, “A lot of people think having money makes them better than other people. I like to aim my pen at such pretension, and there’s no better way to do it than with humor. I’d have to be Dostoevsky to write my own family’s story without humor.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
