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(Any DUers familiar with Thatcher's record of successful help??)
From NYT; found in search for John Putnam Thatcher
M.J. Latsis, 70, Emma Lathen Writing Team Collaborator
By ROBERT McG. THOMAS Jr.
Published: October 31, 1997
Mary Jane Latsis, who helped make business the backdrop for murder as one half of the Emma Lathen writing team that produced two dozen John Putnam Thatcher mysteries, died on Monday at a hospital in Plymouth, N.H. She was 70 and maintained residences in Warren, N.H., and Brookline, Mass.
Her collaborator, Martha Henissart, said the cause was a heart attack and a stroke.
When the urbane New York banker John Putnam Thatcher made his first appearance on the mystery scene, in a 1961 book named ''Banking on Death,'' it raised eyebrows in two cultures.
For one thing, Thatcher, the executive vice president and head of the trust department of Sloan Guaranty Trust, the world's third largest commercial bank, was the first fictional sleuth to spring from the world of business and finance, and he became an immediate hit on Wall Street.
For another, in a genre in which pseudonyms are common enough, nobody knew who Emma Lathen was, or even suspected that she was two shes, one a 34-year-old Harvard trained economist (Latsis) and the other a 32-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer (Henissart).
It was years before the trade tumbled to their secret, and years more before the writers would agree to be identified in interviews, to avoid embarrassing Miss Henissart's clients.
By the time the two women met as Harvard graduate students in 1952 and discovered a shared addiction to murder mysteries, Miss Latsis, a native of Chicago, had graduated from Wellesley, worked for a while for the Central Intelligence Agency and spent two years in Rome working for the United Nation's Food and Agricultural Organization.
At first they were merely friends and roommates who swapped mysteries and introduced each other to favorite authors before going their separate ways, Miss Latsis to teach economics at Wellesley, Miss Henissart to practice law in New York.
Then in 1960, Miss Henissart took a corporate legal position in Boston. While staying with Miss Latsis during a house hunt, she asked what good mysteries were around and was told there were not any.
''Then let's write one,'' said either Miss Latsis or Miss Henissart, who insists that neither woman had ever been able to recall which of them had uttered the magic words.
Almost immediately they began working out the details of an unconventional collaboration in which they would first agree on the basic structure and major characters, then write and exchange alternating chapters. Miss Latsis, composing in pen on yellow legal pads while sitting in a chair, always produced the first one, and Miss Henissart, using a manual typewriter, the last.
They would then get together for a final joint rewrite, ironing out inconsistencies and gradually synthesizing a distinctive composite style.
The collaboration was rocky at first, especially after Miss Latsis killed off one of Miss Henissart's favorite characters, but they soon found common ground and enough success to quit their jobs.
Although their books, which have sold hundreds of thousands of copies, have been praised for their wit and insights, what set them apart was the authentic, often intricate business deals that produced both the murders and the clues their banker hero used to solve them.
Under the name R.B. Dominic, they created another offbeat fictional detective, an Ohio congressman, but he was never as popular as the redoubtable John Putnam Thatcher. They abandoned the series after seven books.
They generally produced a book every year or so, but once, when Miss Latsis, the daughter of Greek immigrants, became agitated over the 1967 Greek colonel's coup, they interrupted the project they were working on and turned out ''When In Greece'' in six weeks.
Their latest book, ''A Shark Out Of Water,'' is being published by St. Martin's Press this month, and another manuscript, using the Persian Gulf war as a backdrop, is about 80 percent complete. Miss Henissart said she planned to finish it, but did not know if John Putnam Thatcher would continue after that.
With their success, the women, two slender brunettes often taken as sisters, bought a house together in Warren and spent part of each year there, working and talking over plots during long hikes through the White Mountains, their collaborative solitude broken only by Miss Henissart's succession of suitors and Miss Latsis's ever faithful Walter Frank.
Mr. Frank, a Cambridge investment executive, was not the model for John Putnam Thatcher, but over the years he displayed a certain gallantry.
In a concession to an old-fashioned sense of propriety and Miss Latsis's aversion to marriage, she and Mr. Frank maintained a 40-year romance while maintaining separate residences.
He is her only survivor.
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