THE MONEY HARVEST by Ross Thomas

 Finished Su 8/4/24

This is one of my ancient paperbacks that I finished Fr 8/20/93.

The book was published in 1975 and concerns an attempt to corner the commodities market.

Bad guys have gotten a minor player in the Department of Agriculture to hand over inside trader information.

Lots of quirky and well defined characters and I really liked the book and will order more by Ross Thomas. 

From 'Judy' at GoodReads:

Something big is going to go down in Washington, DC on July 11. Crawdad Gilmore overheard a hot tip in the men's room of the private Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C., but he doesn't survive long enough to provide details. His friends and former associates, Jake Pope and Ancel Easter, know the old-time Washington hand had something important to tell them. To find out what it is, they step into a whirlwind powered by greed and graft.

The plot afoot is to rig the commodities market by stealing the Agriculture Department's elaborately guarded, secret crop report before its public release. So although the plot involves the arcane workings of the commodities market, the devilment is in the details.

Thomas loves to play with names and this one delivers a rich harvest of deliciously named scoundrels. In addition to "Crawdad" and Easter, there's Fred C. Clapperton who always used his middle initial "as though he was afraid he'd be mixed up with some other Fred. Clapperton," and a commodity brokerage firm with the melodious name of Anderson, Maytubby & Jones. Hired gun Ralph Hayes' real name is Elefteris Spiliocoupoulos. That's an authentic surname, and Thomas liked it so well he used it for a Greek with the first name of Toss in another of his books, Chinaman's Chance.

The commodities scam here is just the brown paper in which many well-developed character portraits are wrapped:

* Crawdad, "an agnostic until he finally turned to atheism at 93," served in the administrations of six presidents and guarded their secret political machinations well until he needed them, as in the case of how the Jack Kennedy assassination report was constructed.

* Ancel Easter, "the brightest man in Washington," heads Crawdad's law firm, Gilmore, Easter, Timothy and Sterns (GETS), and is powerful enough that homicide detectives come to his nine-story house in Washington's tony Kalorama Circle to give him progress reports.

* Jake Pope, whose mother Simmi Lee was a bootlegger, is a Senate investigator who vets candidates for office by asking the hard questions about their sexual proclivities or their Ponzi schemes. With Crawdad's help, he became rich after an 18 day marriage after his wife died in a car crash. He likes "looking into things."

* An officious GS-14 employee, Dallas Hucks, aspires to the good life and status of Cosmos Club membership, but he's in hock so deep that he's thrown out of his carpool group when the check for his ride share fee bounces. So he eagerly agrees to steal the crop report for a promise of $100,000 on July 11.

* Fulvio Varesi's fulsome biography includes his family's work for Al Capone. At age 22 he started collecting politicians, buying "early and selling cheap," and has no compulsion about having people twepped, a phrase he borrowed from the CIA, meaning Terminated With Extreme Prejudice. Varesi hires Chinese grad students to visit greedy brokers and "go long on wheat." As word circulates that "the Chinese" are buying wheat, the price goes up. On July 11, Varesi will dump it and make a tidy profit, the "Money Harvest" of the title.

* Kyle Tarr of Omaha was part of Fulvio's collection when he was a Congressman from Omaha; now out of office, he looks to sell his influence and get rich quick. He connects with Noah deGraffereid, an antiques dealer who is a high class fence, who finds Hucks to set the scam in motion.

* Hugo Worthy, who lights his cigarettes with an old Zippo lighter, is a homicide detective trying to figure out how to leave his wife and move in with a 22-year old ballet dancer. He discusses gun laws with Ancel Easter over a 25 cent cup of coffee at the morgue.

* Commodity Jack Scurlong, who can "look at a chap and tell if he's been in commodities or had gonorrhea," explains the commodities market to Jake.

If these characters aren't rich enough for you, there is always the sparkling writing. Who else but Ross Thomas can create a word picture of a hallway full of French furniture, of the "spindly-legged design Americans call French Provincial and the French don't call anything at all."

The story may be filled with the relics of the time - a Morris chair, a 1938 bridge lamp, an Impeach Nixon sticker, a corn cob pipe and Prince Albert tobacco - but its Washington politics, though overwrought, are right up to date.