The Wife, The Maid and The Mistress

Ariel Lawhon has written a wonderfully colorful interpretation of what happened to New York Supreme Court Judge Joseph Crater.  Crater mysteriously disappeared in August of 1930 after leaving dinner at a restaurant with two associates, his lawyer, William Klein and his mistress, Sally Lou Ritz. Taking the bare bone facts of the story, Lawhon has woven a fascinating novel, that takes the reader through the days leading up to the disappearance and the relationships Crater and his wife had with Tammany Hall and the corruption that was happening in New York.

In the novel Judge Crater comes up to the Maine summer home he shares with his wife, Stella.  He receives a mysterious phone call while they are out to dinner and returns to the table to explain to Stella that he has to return immediately to NY and will come back to Maine in time for her birthday at the end of the week.  We then learn that he goes out to dinner with his mistress, Ritzi and his lawyer William Klein shows up at the restaurant while they are dining.  After dinner he stops by the theatre ticket window but finding out that there are not two seats left for the show that night he and Ritzi go to a hotel room in Coney Island.  That is the last the Judge is ever heard from.  Unknown men break into the room and while Ritzi hides in a cabinet they beat and carry away the Judge.

We then learn the story of how Judge Crater arrived at this point in time through the stories of Sally Lou Ritz, his mistress and their times together, the maid, Marie Simon, who cleans the Crater's New York City apartment, and whose husband Jude, becomes the police detective assigned to the case of the missing man.  Finally we follow Stella, as she becomes the grieving widow, though she never seems to really be sorry she has lost her husband, just her meal ticket and possibly her standing in the society life.  Through these ladies interspersed accounts, and carefully following the dates at the beginning of each chapter, the reader can try to solve the mystery of the Judge's disappearance.

For 38 years, Stella returns to the Club Abbey, orders two whiskeys, drinks one and toasts her missing husband, with the quote, "Good luck Joe wherever you are".  This happens both in real life and in the novel.  Author, Lawhon has used creative license to add characters and combine characters to flesh out the story of what might have happened to Judge Joseph Force Crater.

This is a fascinating tale that Lawhon has kept close to the facts while creating an imaginative mystery novel that keeps the reader engaged until the very end.