My copy of Jeanne Hart's 1987 novel Fetish, the original American edition, is inscribed (though they are not named) to Robert Barnard and his wife Louise: 'May 1988: For my favourite mystery writer and his wife'. She also covered the jacket blurb with a post-it note saying: Please ignore the blurb, it's dreadful!' In 1989, the book was published in the UK under the Collins Crime Club imprint, with the title changed (for reasons we can guess at!) to A Personal Possession. Whether Bob Barnard introduced Jeanne Hart to Elizabeth Walter, for years his editor at Collins, I don't know.
Fetish is a debut novel and it did well. The book was shortlisted for a Macavity award for best first novel and the UK edition reached the shortlist for the John Creasey Dagger. My copy bears an encomium from Ruth Rendell, no less: 'This is a truly original work. The idea behind the plot is clever and very unusual and has the effect of immediately riveting the reader's attention...It is a very accomplished piece of work.' High praise - and, in my opinion, it is well merited.
Three women friends, Zora, Sally, and Eileen, are wondering what to do with their lives. As Zora says: 'At our age, who wants a husband? They wind up with midlife crises and heart attacks and you're worse off than before.' But they decide they'd be interested in sharing a man - so they advertise for one. As well as the predictable crazy people, those who reply include one man whom they find appealing. There is a meeting - but some time later, Sally winds up dead - battered to death with an objet d'art, a brass stone fetish figure.
The detecting is undertaken by a likeable (and very happily married) cop called Carl Pedersen and his inquiries turn up a whole host of suspects. The structure of the story is quite unorthodox, and the prose is high-calibre. Above all, this is a story told with striking and impressive economy. I liked the plot and the characterisation and it's a book that will stay in my mind.
Jeanne Hart only published three more novels, two of them featuring Pedersen. She was born in 1919, so she started late, and she died in 1990. The brevity of her career means that her name is now little-known. But she was, I think, a writer of quality.