All is Not Quiet on the Potomac

Baltimore: Reid, Alton and Company, Inc.. Very Good+ in Very Good dj. (c.1962). First Edition. Hardcover. [good solid copy, very light soiling to page edges, minor wear at corners; jacket moderately worn at corners/edges, a bit of soiling, minor chipping at spine ends]. This novel -- the author's "latest novel" and her "first in more than a decade," per the jacket copy (although a LoC search turns up only this one title under her name) -- "takes the reader behind the scenes of social, political and diplomatic Washington. With her singular urbanity and lightness of touch, [the author] delightfully reveals the hidden machinations that led to the twenty-four hour period -- midnight to midnight -- when all involved find the course of their lives changes." The jacket copy proceeds to describe enough stock characters to populate a small city -- Peyton Place, for example -- among them such cliches as: "Washington's most publicized hostess" (possibly a surrogate for the author herself); a widely syndicated columnist "whose pen often leaks venom"; a "handsome bachelor and the youngest legislator on the Hill, who hides under a secret of his own"; a distinguished legislator, "the Senate's eldest solon"; and (my favorite if only for the wonderful invented adjective), "Yvette DuBois, an eminently stuprable[!] female whose amoral activities lend a touch of both mystery and hilarious humor." There's also a butler, a San Francisco heiress, an oil tycoon, the D.C. police chief, the French ambassador -- you get the idea. According to the jacket bio of the "Authoress," she began publishing short stories at the age of nineteen, and followed with "novels, novelettes, serials and hundreds of short stories published in leading magazines in the United States and England, dramatizations," etc. -- in addition to her activities as "an accomplished musician, a poet and an exhibiting artist who has had several successful one-woman shows." Uh-huh. And I'm sure "stuprable" is a real word, too. (Maybe she means "shtuppable.") .