McNally's Secret by Lawrence Sanders

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


"I poured a few drops of an '87 Mondavi Chardonnay into her navel and leaned down to slurp it out."

Time for another purely leisure read? Archy McNally comes to the rescue. Lawrence Sanders' McNally's Secret (1991) is my fifth but chronologically the first installment in the series. The author introduces the debonair Archy, the head and only employee of the Discreet Inquiries Department in his father's Palm Beach law firm.

The inquiries that Archy is discreetly pursuing concern the stolen sheet of rare stamps owned by the notorious Palm Beach high society woman, Lady Cynthia Horowitz, legendary for her numerous ex-husbands, short temper, and wonderful parties she gives. She also is a great conversationalist - as Archy says:

"[...] she couldn't have been a more gracious and fascinating raconteuse over postprandial brandies."

The seventy-year-old Lady Cynthia is the first person Archy talks to about the theft and - in a supremely whimsical passage - he is given an opportunity to see her wading out of a swimming pool

"[...] seeing that incredible nude emerging from the pool - Venus rising from the chlorine - I felt only an ineffable sadness, realizing I had been born forty years too late.

Lady Cynthia is also the employer of Consuela Garcia, Archy's recurrent love interest. But Connie is not Archy's current flame: he is smitten with a mysterious Ms. Towley, the owner of a convenient navel to drink chardonnay from, a woman seemingly "bereft of her senses." She is able to offer Archy "the most paradisiacal afternoon" of his life, presumably filled with a special kind of acrobatic gymnastics. And let's not forget that Archy is an old hand in all this; he is "the man whose pals had considered nominating for a Nobel Prize in philandering."

The plot is rather straightforward and Archy moves slowly in his discreet inquiries but the readers will likely enjoy a really major plot twist that occurs toward the end of the novel. I particularly like the resolution of Ms. Towley's thread: it transcends the comedy and almost reaches the level of reality.

The cover blurb screams "Sex. Lies. Blackmail." Indeed the novel delivers and rather in an unostentatious way. As usual, Mr. Sanders' prose is tactful, witty, and funny. We have delicate whimsy rather than repulsive physicality of many contemporary authors. While the flowery prose is not yet as accomplished as in the later McNally novels it is a joy to read for its frequent use of "SAT words", circumlocutions, and cool understatements as in the passage where Archy describes his gift for a couple of newlyweds: "two lovely polished seashells" that have "definite physical symbolism" in their size and shape. My marginal recommendation is mainly for the prose.

Two-and-a-half stars.




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