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Brilliant,
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4 reviews

The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress: A Novel
by Ariel Lawhon

Published: 2014-01-28
Hardcover : 320 pages
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Recommended to book clubs by 4 of 4 members
“Inspired by a real-life unsolved mystery, this mesmerizing novel features characters that make a lasting impression.”--PEOPLE MAGAZINE

"More meticulously choreographed than a chorus line. It all pays off."--THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW


They say behind every great man, there's a ...
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Introduction

“Inspired by a real-life unsolved mystery, this mesmerizing novel features characters that make a lasting impression.”--PEOPLE MAGAZINE

"More meticulously choreographed than a chorus line. It all pays off."--THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW


They say behind every great man, there's a woman. In this case, there are three.
Stella Crater, the judge's wife, is the picture of propriety draped in long pearls and the latest Chanel. Ritzi, a leggy showgirl with Broadway aspirations, thinks moonlighting in the judge's bed is the quickest way off the chorus line. Maria Simon, the dutiful maid, has the judge to thank for her husband's recent promotion to detective in the NYPD. Meanwhile, Crater is equally indebted to Tammany Hall leaders and the city's most notorious gangster, Owney "The Killer" Madden.

On a sultry summer night, as rumors circulate about the judge's involvement in wide-scale political corruption, the Honorable Joseph Crater steps into a cab and disappears without a trace. Or does he?

After 39 years of necessary duplicity, Stella Crater is finally ready to reveal what she knows. Sliding into a plush leather banquette at Club Abbey, the site of many absinthe-soaked affairs and the judge's favorite watering hole back in the day, Stella orders two whiskeys on the rocks—one for her and one in honor of her missing husband. Stirring the ice cubes in the lowball glass, Stella begins to tell a tale—of greed, lust, and deceit. As the novel unfolds and the women slyly break out of their prescribed roles, it becomes clear that each knows more than she has initially let on.

With a layered intensity and prose as effervescent as the bubbly that flows every night, The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress is a wickedly entertaining historical mystery that will transport readers to a bygone era with tipsy spins through subterranean jazz clubs and backstage dressing rooms. But beneath the Art Deco skyline and amid the intoxicating smell of smoke and whiskey, the question of why Judge Crater disappeared lingers seductively until a twist in the very last pages.

Editorial Review

Joshilyn Jackson
Ariel Lawhon

Joshilyn Jackson interviews Ariel Lawhon, author of The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress: A Novel

Joshilyn: Your novel revisits an unsolved mystery of Old New York. How did you first find it? What about it made you want to use the truth as a vehicle to drive your own story?

Ariel: Iâ??d never heard of Joseph Crater until I read an article about him in The New York Post nine years ago. I didnâ??t know that his disappearance was the biggest missing personâ??s case of the twentieth century or that he was a household name for almost fifty years. It was fascinating. But in all of that, what intrigued me most was his wife Stella, and her strange yearly ritual. Starting on the first anniversary of her husbandâ??s disappearance, she would go to a bar in Greenwich Village and order two drinks. Sheâ??d raise one in salute, â??Good luck, Joe, wherever you are!â?? Then sheâ??d drink it and walk out of the bar, leaving the other untouched on the table. She did this every year for thirty-nine years. After reading that article Stella Crater took up permanent residence in my mind. Iâ??d close my eyes and sheâ??d be there, in that corner booth, a glass of whiskey in her hand, practically daring me to tell her story. So I did.

Joshilyn: You have blended actual historical events so seamlessly into your fiction that I canâ??t tell where truth ends and your imagination takes over. How did you create this world?

Ariel: The real Crater mystery is filled with all these fascinating but seemingly disconnected details: mysterious cash-filled envelopes, theater tickets, grand jury investigations, random injuries, missing wills, bribery allegations. I wanted to take all the peripheral details that are often nothing more than footnotes in the historical record and make them integral to the story. But this could only be done when put in contrast with the real people involved: crooked politicians, seedy gangsters, an uncooperative wife, ambitious dancing girls, theater moguls, police officers, nosey reporters. It was all there for the taking but there were gaps. Big questions no one could answer with any certainty, not the least of which is what actually happened to Judge Crater. So I took the details I could verify (hello research you are my drug) and then arranged the blank spaces to fit my own theories. In the end, it became a portrait of what could have happened.

Joshilyn: You have three narrators - which of them is least like you? And did that distance make it easier or harder to write her?

Ariel: Donâ??t be like me. Donâ??t write three different stories centered on the same missing man and then try to weave them together into a cohesive whole. You will feel like youâ??re sewing up a bag of cats. And you will, inevitably, find that one character is easier to write than the others (Ritzi). You will like her best even though you arenâ??t supposed to play favorites. This will do strange things to your moral compass, because you like the mistress best. One of the characters will be cold and elusive and you will have nothing in common with her (Stella). She will scare you a little bit and make you doubt your own ability at every turn. Her name will become an expletive. And then there will be one that surprises you (Maria). She will be both devout and sensual. You will make her do things that cause you unreasonable guilt given her imaginary status. You will lose sleep. In the end she will break your heart.

Joshilyn: Where do you do your writing?

Ariel: Anywhere. Everywhere. The first flat surface I can find that isnâ??t littered with Legos or used Band Aids. The better question would probably be when do you write (answer: whenever white space shows up on the calendar). Apparently there is this thing called biology. And it WORKS. So thanks to biology I have four children. All of them boys. All of them highly intelligent and off-the-charts active. We call them The Wild Rumpus. And we will not buy nice things until they grow up and leave home. So the when and where of writing is a daily tightrope walk for me. Itâ??s probably not the best way to write books but itâ??s the only way I know how and it seems to be working well so far.

Excerpt

Club Abbey, Greenwich Village, August 6, 1969

WE BEGIN IN A BAR. We will end here as well but that is more than you need to know at the moment. For now, a woman sits in a corner booth waiting to give her confession. But her party is late, and without an audience she looks small and alone, like an invalid in an over-sized church pew. It’s not so easy for her, this truth telling, and she strains against it. A single strand of pearls—brittle and yellowed with age—rests against the flat plane of her chest. She rolls them between her fingers as though counting the beads on a rosary. Stella Crater has avoided this confession for thirty-nine years. The same number of years she has been coming to this bar.

Not long ago this meeting would have been a spectacle, splashed across the headlines of every paper in New York: Wife of Missing Judge Meets with Lead Investigator, Tells All! But the days of front-page spreads, interviews, and accusations are over, filed away in some distant archive. Tonight her stage is empty.

Stella looks at her watch. Nine-fifteen.

Club Abbey was once a speakeasy during the Jazz age, and is now another relic in Greenwich Village, peddling its former glory through the tourist guides. It sits one floor below street level, dark and subdued. Scuffed pine floors. Black and white photos line the walls. An aging jukebox has long since replaced the jazz quartet. The only remnant is Stan, the bartender. He was fifteen when hired by notorious gangster Owney Madden to sweep the floors at closing. Owney took a liking to the kid, as did the showgirls, and Stan’s been behind the bar ever since. He’s never missed Stella’s ritual. His part is small, but he plays it well.

Two lowball glasses. Twelve cubes of ice split between them. Crown Royal on the rocks. Stan arranges napkins on her table and sets the glasses down. Her eyes are slick with a watery film—the harbinger of age and death.

“Good to see you again, Mrs. Crater.”

Stella swats him away with an emaciated hand and he hangs back to watch, drying glasses with a dishtowel. It’s the same thing every year: she sits alone in her booth for a few minutes and then he brings the drinks. Straight whiskey, the way her husband liked it. She’ll raise one glass, saluting the empty place across from her, and say, “Good luck, Joe, wherever you are.” Stella will take her time with the drink, letting it burn, drawing out the moment until there’s nothing left in her glass. That is when she’ll rise and walk out, leaving the other drink untouched.

Except tonight she does none of these things.

Fifteen minutes she sits there, rubbing the rim of her glass. Stan has no script for what to do next and he stares at her, confused. He doesn’t see the door swing open or the older gentleman enter. Doesn’t see the trench coat or the faded gray fedora. Sees none of it until Detective Jude Simon slides into the booth across from Stella.

She lays her palm on the table, inches from a pack of cigarettes, and sits up straighter. The booth is hard against her back, walnut planks pressing against the knobs of her spine. “You’re late.”

“Stella.” Jude touches the brim of his hat in greeting. He takes stock of her shriveled body. Tips his head to the side.

“It’s been years.”

“You were here the first time, makes sense that you’d be here the last.” Stella lifts her glass and takes a sip of whiskey. Shudders. “Call it a deathbed confession.”

Jude surveys the room through the weary smoke. The regular Thursday night crowd, a few women, mostly men are scattered around in groups of twos and threes drinking longnecks and griping about the stock market. “This isn’t exactly a church and I’m not much of a priest,” he says.

“Priest. Detective. What’s the difference? You both love a good confession.”

His shoulders twitch—a doubter’s shrug. “I’m retired.”

Stella pulls a cigarette from the pack and props it between her lips. She looks at him, expectant.

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a tarnished silver lighter. Something like a smile crosses his face and then melts away. He stares at it for a moment, cupped there in his palm before striking it with his thumb. Jude used to be handsome, decades ago when Stella first met him, and the traces are still there in the square line of his jaw and the steel-blue eyes. But now he looks tired and sad. A bit wilted. It takes three tries before a weak flame erupts from the lighter. Perhaps his hand trembles as he holds it toward her or it could be a trick of the light.

Stella tips her cigarette into the flame and the end glows orange. “You would be here tonight even if I hadn’t asked you to come.” Her eyes shift toward the bar where Stan pretends not to eavesdrop. “You have your sources.”

“Maybe.” Jude hangs his fedora on a peg beside the booth and pulls a pad and pen from inside his coat pocket. He waits for her to speak.

Stella lured him here with the promise of a story—the real version this time. He has been like a duck after breadcrumbs for thirty-nine years. Pecking. Relentless. Gobbling up every scrap she leaves for him. Yet the truth is not something she will rush tonight. He will get it one morsel at a time.

Stella Crater picked her poison a long time ago—unfiltered Camels—and she takes a long drag now, sizing up her pet duck. Her cheeks collapse into the sharp angles of her face and she holds the smoke in her lungs for a long moment before blowing it from between her teeth. Oh, she’ll tell Detective Simon a story all right.

Chapter One

Belgrade Lakes, Maine, Saturday, August 2, 1930

Stella slept with the windows thrown open that summer, a breeze blowing back the curtains. The sounds of nature lulled her to sleep: frogs croaking in the shallow water beneath her window, the hum of a dragonfly outside the rusted screen, the call of a loon across the lake. She lay there, with one arm thrown across her face in resistance to the burgeoning sunlight, when she heard the Cadillac crunch up the long gravel driveway.

Joe.

Stella sat up and threw her legs over the edge of the bed, toes resting against the cool floorboards. She pushed a tangle of pale curls away from her eyes with a fine-boned hand. Yawned. Then grabbed a blue cotton shift from the floor and pulled it over her tan shoulders. She hadn’t expected her husband to come—hadn’t wanted him to—but there was no mistaking the familiar rumble of that engine. She went out to meet him wearing yesterday’s dress and a contrived grin.

“You’re back.”

Joseph Crater leaned out the open window and drew her in for a kiss. “Drove all night. We beat the Bar Harbor Express by an hour!” He clapped their chauffeur on the back. “We’ll have to paint a racing stripe down the side of this old thing.”

Stella pulled the car door open and saw two things at once: he’d brought her flowers—white peonies, her favorite—and he wasn’t wearing his wedding band. Again. The sight of that naked finger stripped the grin from her face.

Joe climbed out and reached for her with one arm, but she took a small step backward and looked at his pants pocket. The imprint of his ring pressed round against his cotton trousers. The question that surfaced was not the one she really wanted to ask. “Did you have a pleasant trip?”

He nodded.

“Where did you go?”

Joe’s answer was cautious. “Atlantic City. With William Klein.”

Her voice was even, almost carefree. “Just the two of you?” Joe hesitated long enough for her to rephrase the question. “Were you and William alone?”

He glanced at Fred Kahler, stiff behind the wheel, eyes downcast, and responded with a single sharp word. “Stell.”

It took a moment to find her breath. All that fresh air and she couldn’t pull a stitch of it into her lungs. “Must you be so flagrant about it?”

“We’ll talk about this later.”

Stella heard the warning in his voice, but didn’t care. She rose up onto the balls of her feet, the gravel digging into her bare skin, as anger ripped through her voice. “We have nothing to talk about!”

His eyes went small and dark.

Stella grabbed the car door and, with a rage that startled them both, slammed it shut, crushing Joe’s hand in the frame. She heard the crunch before he screamed, and when he yanked his hand away, two fingers were bloody and mangled.

Stella waited for Joe on the deck of the Salt House. It was Belgrade Lakes’ only fine-dining establishment, and they’d been late, thanks to his difficulty dressing with one hand. She had refused to help him.

Joe hadn’t yelled at her after the incident. Hadn’t called her names or lifted a hand to strike her. All he said was, “I’ll need your help with this mess.” Almost polite. Then he soaked his hand in the kitchen sink and waited for her to gather ointment and gauze. She had wrapped the bandage tighter than necessary, angered anew by his cavalier attitude and the way he expected her to accept that a man of his position would have a mistress. As though some skirt on Broadway was the same thing as a membership in the City Club.

By the time they arrived at the restaurant, he’d created a plausible fiction for his injury. “Had a beastly run-in with a Studebaker,” Joe explained to their waiter, wiggling his fingers for effect. “Damn thing tried to eat my hand for lunch.” And then, shortly after being seated, he excused himself to make a phone call.

Stella ordered their meal from a menu of summer fare: grilled fish, steaks, roasted vegetables, and fruit. A pleasant breeze rolled off the lake, rocking the Chinese lanterns that were strung around the deck. The red-and-yellow globes sent dancing spheres of amber across the linen tablecloths. Only a handful of the tables were occupied, and the diners leaned close over the candles, lost in conversation or in silence as they enjoyed the view. The longer she waited for Joe to return, the more they sent sympathetic glances her way.

The meal arrived with wine and bread, and Stella shifted candles and silverware to make room for the ample dinner. She waited until their server departed with his tray before taking a long drink of merlot. Steam rose from the pan-seared trout with lemon-caper sauce on her plate, and she wondered what sort of mood Joe would be in when he finished his call.

Minutes later, the door banged open on loose hinges, and Stella forced a smile as Joe strode toward the table, shoulders rounded forward like an ox. It was a look Stella knew well. Fury and determination and arrogance.

He yanked his chair away from the table with his good hand. “I’m leaving in the morning.”

“Why?”

“I have to go back to the city tomorrow. Straighten a few things out. I’ll be back on Thursday, in plenty of time for your birthday.”

“But—”

“Don’t snivel. It doesn’t become you.” Joe unfolded the crisp black napkin and spread it over his lap. “You shouldn’t have waited. Food’s getting cold.”

Stella stayed in bed when Joe pushed back the covers at six the next morning. She stayed there while he bathed—the water turning on with a groan of rusted pipes—and when his toothbrush tapped against the sink. Stella stayed curled around her pillow when he rattled through the dresser and yanked his clothes from the closet. Didn’t move when he nudged her shoulder or when he cursed or when he brushed dry lips against her temple—a rote farewell—his freshly shaved chin rubbing against her cheek. Not until she heard his footsteps on the stairs did she open her eyes. And only when the Cadillac roared to life outside did she sit up. Four steps brought her to the window. She wiped his kiss from her temple. “Goodbye.”

The last Stella Crater ever saw of her husband was a glimpse of his shirt collar through the rear window as Fred eased the Cadillac down the gravel driveway. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. Many of the scandals depicted in The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress could easily be on the cover of People magazine today. We often tend to romanticize bygone eras like the 1930s. Did this novel open your eyes to the fact that the more things change the more they stay the same?

2. What did you think when Maria returned to Judge Crater’s room and took the envelope her husband had planted there? Gutsy move or foolish?

3. There is a very unusual bond that develops between Maria, Ritzi and Stella. How is their connection different from female friendships today? Are there similarities?

4. The three women actually exert a tremendous amount of influence over the men in their lives, but it’s all done in a very surreptitious way. What does this say about the dynamic between men and women in the 1930s?

5. “Only fools underestimate the strength of Stella Crater.” Were you surprised at Stella’s evolution from seemingly “good wife” to ultimate power player?

6. There are some interesting counterpoints going on in the novel: Jude and Maria’s happy marriage compared with Judge Crater and Stella’s marriage of convenience; Maria’s inability to have a child and Ritzi’s unwanted child. How did these juxtapositions enhance your enjoyment of the novel?

7. Did you find the contents of Ritzi’s letter to Stella surprising? What about Maria’s role?

8. There are many real people and events woven into the storyline. Were you inspired to find out more about people like Judge Crater, Owney Madden, William Klein, and Ritzi? Who was the person who intrigued you the most?

9. Who would you cast as Stella, Maria, and Ritzi if the book were to be made into a movie?

10. Judge Crater’s disappearance remains a mystery to this day. What do you think happened to him?

Notes From the Author to the Bookclub

In a setting most often viewed through the lens of mobster or police investigator, Ariel Lawhon's The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress delves instead into the history of three women who understand their own power and use it to protect not only their personal interests, but at times their very lives. Lawhon's engaging style, both film noir-ish and intensely emotional, delivers an enticing peek into the political and criminal underbelly of 1930s New York."

— Julie Kibler, author of CALLING ME HOME

“In this tale of Jazz Age New York, Lawhon walks one of fiction’s trickiest tightropes, creating a novel that is both genuinely moving and full of pulpy fun.…The imagined events of the novel become even more poignant when the reader discovers that the story is based on the real-life disappearance of Joseph Crater and that most of the characters were real people, like the notorious madam Vivian Gordon and the vile gangster Owney Madden. It’s a great story, told with verve and feeling.”—Booklist

“Ariel Lawhon has concocted a stylish homage to noir in The Wife, The Maid, and The Mistress. This fun, fast-paced novel has it all: speakeasies, gangsters, show girls, and not one, not two, but three women scorned. A real page turner.”

—Melanie Benjamin, New York Times bestselling author of THE AVIATOR’S WIFE.

Book Club Recommendations

Member Reviews

Overall rating:
 
 
by tara m. (see profile) 01/29/24

 
  "Great for book club discussion"by Suzy P. (see profile) 08/10/17

I loved that this was based on a true event from the 1930s. The author makes a plausible theory on what could have happened. I liked the 3 strong women character and it was fun to discuss women's roles... (read more)

 
by Beth O. (see profile) 09/12/16

 
by Kate H. (see profile) 08/26/14

 
  "The Wife, The Maid and The Mistress, Ariel Lawhon"by Gail R. (see profile) 03/10/14

maidIn this novel, based on a true story, the author tries to explain how the New York State Supreme Court Justice, Joseph Crater, suddenly went missing. He does a marvelous job of creating ... (read more)

 
  "The Wife, the Maid, and The Mistress"by Elizabeth P. (see profile) 01/28/14

Who would have thought that being a maid could be this dangerous? Maria never would have guessed that.

Maria cleaned for Judge Joseph Crater who had a mistress and who was

... (read more)

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