Stray Lamb

“I always suspected,” says protagonist T. Lawrence Lamb, “that an investment banker and a second-story man had a great deal in common.” The line is from a 1929 novel. It’s prescient, considering what happened in late October that year—the Wall Street Crash. That debacle tipped the United States into a ten-year Great Depression, echoed most recently in the crash of 2008, from which the U.S. economy is still recovering. Mr. Lamb is an investment banker. He has a point. The banker-burglars of 2008 have yet to be held fully accountable for the financial hardships they and their conservative political backers imposed on the American people. Recovery is still incomplete, and rightwing politicos seem bent on ensuring that it ever will be.

Mr. Lamb, however, is a comic character, and the novel by Thorne Smith in which he appears is merely a bit of fun. It’s called The Stray Lamb. I stumbled on it when I pulled a long-neglected volume from a dusty corner of my bookshelf, The Thorne Smith 3-Decker, a Doubleday, Doran and Company edition from 1939. I don’t recall where I picked it up, some book sale or other, I suppose. But it’s a delightful dive back into the murky madcap humor of a bygone era.

Thorne Smith

James Thorne Smith, Jr. (March 27, 1892 – June 21, 1934), who wrote under simply Thorne Smith, may be best remembered for two Topper novels. The original Topper (1926) and its sequel Topper Takes a Trip (1932) starred another banker, Cosmo Topper. Smith’s bankers, saddled with unsatisfactory wives, invariably get into outrageous scrapes. These novels led to a series of film and television versions. The first film, Topper, was a Hal Roach vehicle for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1937, featuring Roland Young and Billie Burke, with a cast that included Cary Grant and Constance Bennett, who were the bigger stars. An American television series of the same name began in 1953 and starred Leo G. Carroll as Cosmo Topper. The pilot and several early episodes were written by Stephen Sondheim.

Thorne Smith’s urbane, zany novels are redolent of the abandon of the Roaring Twenties. There’s an abundance of sex and alcohol. Whether sex figured in Smith’s own life, I don’t know. Alcohol certainly seemed to, by all accounts. He died of a heart attack at age 42.

Mr. Lamb’s tale is the first novel in The Thorne Smith 3-Decker, which also includes the novels, Turnabout (1931) and Rain in the Doorway (1933). The last broadcast episode of the original Star Trek television series, “Turnabout Intruder” (1969), was based on Turnabout. Perhaps I’ll read that one next.