By Dennis Fischman

A lot of authors have come out of the White House. There is a whole shelf of Presidential memoirs, some more readable than others – and some less self-serving than others. 

Ron Reagan Jr. wrote a memoir of his presidential papa, My Father at 100. (An amusing side note: Ron the younger was a freshman at Yale in the Fall of 1976, the same semester as I started there. Because he didn’t submit a photo for the freshman yearbook, above the name “Ronald Reagan” appeared a portrait of Karl Marx.)

In the mystery genre, Hillary Clinton, former First Lady and Secretary of State, co-authored State of Terror with noted author Louise Penny. It’s an international thriller involving a President who appoints one of his critics as Secretary of State. Sound familiar? The book received mixed reviews, but no one could deny that Clinton was writing about a world she knew firsthand.

Murder in the White House, by Margaret Truman
G.K. Hal l& Co., 1980, 409 pages.

You could say the same about Murder in the White House, by Margaret Truman. The daughter of former President Harry Truman (1945-1953) began her career as a writer by penning biographies of her father and her mother, Bess Truman. In this book, Margaret turned her hand to murder mysteries set in Washington, DC. It’s the first in a series she called Capital Crimes.

The murdered man is Secretary of State Lansard Blaine. The scene of the crime is the White House, fairly late at night, when only a limited number of people would have access to the room in which his garroted body is found.

That sounds like the setup for a cozy mystery, in the style of Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers. But Special Counsel Ron Fairbanks, whom President Webster assigns to head the investigation, soon finds out that nothing is as it seems. Not the Secretary of State himself, who has a secret life full of sex and bribery. Not the Secret Service, which may be trying to get Fairbanks off the case. And not the President, his psychologist wife, or their beautiful young daughter, Lynne, who’s been romantically linked with Ron Fairbanks for a while before the case begins.

Will Ron be able to solve the murder? To do so, will he have to ruin the First Family (or else betray the ethical independence that made him a trustworthy White House counsel in the first place)?

Murder in the White House is not a bad debut to a mystery series. The pace is a bit uneven – it really speeds up toward the end – and the Washington, DC it portrays is a world where nearly every important person is a WASP male, usually from either an elite college or military background, and the biggest political differences are over how much free trade vs. how much protectionism to allow in international economics. That makes the story feel dated today.

But the female characters are not mere plot devices: they are full characters with motives and powers of their own. And the female author, the daughter of a former President, was in a unique position to bring us behind the scenes of power politics in the U.S. capital.

Will Malia Obama or Barron Trump write murder mysteries someday? If so, they can only hope they do as well as Margaret Truman did.