Cornelius Hirschberg (1901-1995) is another of those authors who emerge from nowhere, produce one fine mystery, and then turn their attention to other pursuits, leaving readers like me to wonder how many more good stories were left untold.
Hirschberg was 63 years old when his book Florentine Finish (Harper & Row, 1963) won the Edgar Award for Best First Mystery in 1964. The New York Times reported that he had been writing off and on his entire life. https://www.nytimes.com/1964/04/25/archives/jewel-seller-63-wins-rook-prize-author-writing-on-weekends-in-his.html
Hirschberg worked in the New York jewelry trade for about 25 years and his experience set the context for his story about Saul Hardy, a former Chicago police detective who decided not to go back to law enforcement after his service in Korea. He’s been working in jewelry sales for years now and quite accidentally gets in the middle of a multi-person transaction for a 5-carat diamond that gets swapped for a different one somewhere in the process. The new diamond is recognized by the buyer’s appraiser as a stone taken in a major burglary that resulted in three deaths, including that of a police officer. Saul looks like a good arrest candidate to the burglary department but they have no real evidence. When the cops finally release his vehicle from custody, another body is soon found in the back seat, putting him back in the bulls’ eye.
Of all of the crime fiction I’ve read that was set in New York, this is the only one I remember that takes place in the heart of the Diamond District, where experts recognize individual diamonds as if they had faces and sellers routinely carry hundreds of thousands of dollars in precious stones in their coat pockets. The in-depth description of life in the gem industry on 47th Street is worth the reading time, quite apart from the mystery.
Anthony Boucher said in his column in The New York Times:
“Hirschberg is a jewelry salesman in his sixties who wrote his autobiography (The Priceless Gift) three years ago. His detective is also a jewelry salesman, and his plot is an ingenious one about substituting hot diamonds for legitimate merchandise. The telling is fast and crisp, in the medium-boiled style; but what gives the book its unusual distinction is its wonderfully detailed picture of life and business (which is 99 per cent of life) in the jewelry market in the first block of West 47th Street, which Hirschberg knows the way Jerome Weidman knew the garment industry.” https://www.nytimes.com/1963/10/27/archives/criminals-at-large.html
Recommended to anyone looking for a mystery that is out of the ordinary. Copies are readily available on the secondary market.