The Secret Lives of Used Books (The Velvet Fleece, by Lois Eby and John C. Fleming)
This Dell paperback copy of Lois Eby and John C. Fleming’s The Velvet Fleece (1947) was once owned by a woman named Ella Mayfield, but more interesting is that it was once for sale at the International Book & News Agency at 17 Amerikis Street in Athens, Greece, at a price of 3,500 drachmas.
The novel involves a con man’s attempt to swindle a young war widow in a sleepy southern-California burg by pretending to have been a close Army buddy of the woman’s deceased husband. The grifter comes bearing a bogus endearment supposedly entrusted to him by the departed husband — the last living connection to a hopeful future that died in battle on Okinawa. The book was made into the B movie Larceny a year later.
Cons of this sort were typical during and after World War II, as noted by Harry Lever and Joseph Young in their 1945 book Wartime Racketeers. That book catalogues a wide variety of home-front crimes and criminals that sprang up during the conflict: serial war wives working military-allotment and -insurance scams; the hijacking and bootlegging of scarce goods (everything from structural steel and nylon stockings to gasoline, meat, sugar, and cigarettes); the counterfeiting of ration coupons; military contractors profiting from the sale of equipment known to be defective (everything from malfunctioning detonators and mislabeled explosives to faulty copper wire); bogus charities that preyed on wartime sentiment (help for China, help for disabled or deprived vets, etc.); medical men who would offer to get people out of the draft (for money); payroll padding and price fixing on government contracts; spurious veterans’ organizations; and more. The Greatest Generation.
In chapter 2 (“The Meanest Men”), Lever and Young write of exactly the type of con featured in The Velvet Fleece:
There is a type of wartime racketeer so low in the human scale that even his partners in crime will shy away from him. For the most part his stock in trade is death and the anguish of the bereaved. A soldier killed in action is his key to profit. Lacking that, however, he is not without recourse, for he is capable of fabricating death when it serves his ends to do so.
Armed with a casualty list from a daily newspaper and the insensibility to human suffering of his ghoul-like nature, he preys upon the next of kin. His casualty list tells him where they are to be found. His hyenic instincts guide him from that point in capitalizing on the sorrow and fears and hopes of his victims in a score of ways.
. . . Perhaps the most variegated of grave-robbing rackets are those in which an “old friend” of a serviceman, living or dead, fastens on the latter’s family until he has bled it dry.
None of this, of course, is exclusive to World War II. Any war brings with it such unwholesome opportunities — in life and in art. For instance, the bonkers 2014 thriller The Guest involves a similar bereavement con being perpetrated against the family of an American soldier killed in Afghanistan. Plus ça change . . .
