Florentine Finish – Cornelius Hirschberg,
1963
Mystery writers who have used their own personal or
professional experience include Erle Stanley Gardner (lawyering), P.D. James
(health care administration), Sarah Paretseky (insurance) and writing as Emma
Lathen, Mary Jane Latsis (banking and law) and Martha Henissart (economics and
finance).
Three years after publishing his autobiography, The
Priceless Gift, Cornelius Hirschberg put his experience as a
jewelry salesman to work in a crime novel, Florentine Finish. It is a
fast-paced adventure of murder in the black market jewelry business. The story
is about Saul Handy, an ex-police officer who sells jewelry. As the result of a
private deal, he finds himself in the midst of three murders connected to the
jewelry black market. He is being framed for the murders, so he decides to
solve them himself.
The violence in Florentine Finish is contrived at
times, according to Elmer Pry of Twentieth-Century Crime and Mystery Writers.
For example, Handy has a bloody body hanging out of his back seat as he drives
for blocks. Finally, a police officer stops him and asks, "Who's your
friend?" Overall, though, Pry was impressed with this novel. He wrote,
"[Hirschberg's] use of the commercial setting is as intriguing, as
informed and informing, and as central to his story as Wall Street's banking
milieu is to any of Emma Lathen's Judge Thatcher stories, although Hirschberg's
style is closer to the hard-boiled mode, with its colloquial language,
violence, and isolated and cynical, but finally somehow sentimental, hero."
This mystery won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel in
1964. He never wrote another book.
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