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 on June 23 at her home in Washington, D.C. She was 78.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said Kathy Rayner, a friend.
Ms. Hitchcock grew up at 10 Gracie Square, a blue-chip co-op on the East River that was once home to Gloria Vanderbilt, Brooke Astor and other Manhattan society figures. Her mother was Joan Stanton, a glamorous but chilly 1940s-era radio star famous for her role as 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 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.
When she was 29, she married an heir of the wealthy industrialist and Treasury secretary Andrew Mellon, William Mellon Hitchcock — who had earned a bit of notoriety when he rented his mansion in Millbrook, N.Y., to the psychedelic-drug guru Timothy Leary — mixing her newish money with his gilded-age wealth.
A tart observer and a professional wit, Ms. Hitchcock drew from her rarefied ecosystem in all her work, beginning with a series of wanly reviewed films and Off Broadway plays — and one London production, directed by Harold Pinter in 1990. It wasn’t until she began mixing social satire with murder that she found her voice.
“Murder concentrates the mind,” she told The New York Times in 2002.
Reviewing her first novel, “Trick of the Eye” (1992), which involved a trompe l’oeil artist named Faith Crowell and the unsolved murder of a long-dead Long Island debutante, Bruce Allen, writing in The New York Times Book Review, said that Ms. Hitchcock “knows how to write crackling dialogue that expresses character while steadily, stealthily advancing the plot.”
“Even if you guess the ending,” he wrote, “you will enjoy Faith Crowell’s compulsive fascination with ‘the fashion of making things appear to be what they are not.’”
In an interview, Jonathan Burnham, Ms. 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.”
“Her books slammed the hypocrisies and excesses of the world in which she was born, but in the funniest way,” said Lynn de Rothschild, the former media executive. “She didn’t do a ‘La Côte Basque’” — Truman Capote’s infamous 1975 Esquire article that aired the dirty laundry of his society swans in thinly veiled portraits — “she never betrayed anyone. She just murdered them off.”
Still, careful readers like Lady de Rothschild could spot the inspirations for Ms. Hitchcock’s characters. She recalled annotating her copy of “Social Crimes” (2002), in which a dead billionaire leaves his money to a mysterious countess and his wife plots a murder to regain her place in society, with the names of the real-life individuals.
The writer Dominick Dunne was delighted to find himself in “One Dangerous Lady” (2005), rendered as a character named Larry Locket, a magazine reporter who ends up bludgeoned to death. He was even more delighted that his character’s funeral was held at St Patrick’s Cathedral and packed with boldface names like Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Yet in 2009, when “Mortal Friends,” Ms. Hitchcock’s fifth book — and the first set in Washington — was published, there were those who took offense. (The plot: A serial killer known as the Beltway Basher is bumping off young women, and the boyfriend of an unmarried antiques store owner is a suspect.)
She was by then married to Jim Hoagland, the Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent, editor and columnist for The Washington Post, and commuting between New York and the capital. It seemed that Georgetown society was more thin-skinned than the Park Avenue crowd, and, as she told The Washington Post in 2017, “Mortal Friends” lost Ms. Hitchcock a number of friends there.
“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.”
It was a rough period. Ms. Hitchcock had spent several years pursuing an actual crime, as she tried to untangle the transgressions of her mother’s longtime accountant, Kenneth Starr (no relation to the independent counsel who investigated President Bill Clinton). 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.
It took Ms. Hitchcock some time to convince her mother of what had transpired. It took even longer to persuade the district attorney’s office to investigate. It turned out that Mr. Starr, who had a star-studded client list, was also pilfering from Al Pacino, Carly Simon, Uma Thurman and Bunny Mellon, the heiress horticulturalist and philanthropist, among others.
Mrs. Stanton died in 2009. A month later, the publication of “Mortal Friends” and its fallout left Ms. Hitchcock feeling battered, as did the ongoing investigation of her mother’s accountant. (He was finally arrested and charged, and in 2011 he was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison. The prosecutors had asked for 12 years, but the judge argued for a lighter sentence, saying that his victims were all well off and that Mr. Starr had lost his moral compass because of his affection for his fourth wife, a former pole dancer.)
Ms. Hitchcock found solace in online poker, specifically Texas hold ’em, which she played with modest if slightly erratic skill, before going live and competing in tournaments in Atlantic City and Las Vegas, where she was the rare woman at the table.
She was an intuitive player, a “feel” player in the parlance of the game, and she did well enough. But Lara Eisenberg, a poker buddy — who in 2021 won the World Series of Poker Ladies Championship — encouraged her to be more strategic. As an older woman, Ms. Eisenberg told Ms. Hitchcock, she could bluff like crazy and no one would doubt her sincerity. One night, having followed Ms. Eisenberg’s advice, she took second place at a tournament at the Venetian in Las Vegas and won $60,000.
In Ms. Hitchcock’s last book, “Bluff,” published in 2019, a 56-year-old socialite-turned-poker-player sets out to murder the celebrity accountant who has stolen millions from her family. It won that year’s Dashiell Hammett Prize for Literary Excellence, given by the North American branch of the International Association of Crime Writers.
“Poker is like life,” Ms. Hitchcock told The Washington Post. “At the poker table, everyone makes mistakes, everybody plays hands wrong. It’s a game that teaches you about not dwelling on the past, but also learning from your mistakes. You play the next hand as it comes.”
Jane Johnston Crowley was born on Nov. 24, 1946, in Manhattan. Her father, Robert Crowley, was a surgeon; her radio-star mother, Louise (Abrass) Crowley, was known professionally as Joan Alexander. Jane’s parents divorced and, when she was 9, her mother married Mr. Stanton. He adopted Jane, and she took his last name.
Jane attended the Brearley School in Manhattan, the Wheeler School in Providence, R.I., and Sarah Lawrence College, graduating in 1968.
Ms. Hitchcock’s first marriage ended in divorce in 1991. A year later, Tina Brown, who had just become editor in chief of The New Yorker, was giving a dinner for the photographer Richard Avedon and realized on the day of the event that she needed more men. Susan Mercandetti, the veteran magazine and book editor, was drawn in to help. She coaxed Mr. Hoagland to take the train up from Washington in the pouring rain by promising that she would make the trip worth his while. Ms. Hitchcock, she reckoned, would be a captivating seat mate.
The gambit worked, and even Ms. Hitchcock was smitten. She phoned Mr. Hoagland a week later to ask him out for dinner. “I don’t know if you remember me,” she began. He cut her off: “Has anyone ever sat next to Jane Stanton Hitchcock and not remembered?”
They married in 1995. Mr. Hoagland died last year. Ms. Hitchcock, who had been diagnosed with cancer in 2022 — “Moby Dick,” she called her tumor, with typical moxie — ordered his-and-hers headstones. Mr. Hoagland’s inscription reads, “Historical Optimist.” Hers reads, “Hysterical Pessimist.”
Penelope Green is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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