The Comfort Letter

Ordway Smith is the son of a rich Philadelphia lawyer and Charlie Conroy is the son of the family’s gardener. As grown-ups, though, Charlie is a hyperkinetic takeover artist rolling up businesses so fast that neither his finances nor his financers can keep up. Ordway, he decides, is just the lawyer for a crucial bond offering to prop up his financial house of cards.

To whom and what does an attorney owe loyalty? How far must he go to represent a client? Ordway will face these excruciating challenges in 1969 against a backdrop of money troubles, sexual temptation, marital disappointment, and a war in Vietnam that threatens to exile his son.

Fortunately for him, he was the favorite lawyer of the attorney and novelist Arthur R. G. Solmssen. As is often the case in Solmssen’s books, The Comfort Letter is a love story as well as a business drama, and casts a shrewd eye on the tensions between Philadelphia’s WASP elite and the talented Jews they embrace, fear and disdain.

Ordway figures prominently in all four of the novels Solmssen set at the fictional firm of Conyers & Dean, where drinking, smoking and philandering are as standard as suits and ties, and the tools of the trade are paper and phones. Solmssen’s method was to bedevil his mid-century lawyers--the Mad Men of the legal arena--with agonizing moral choices. Their world has vanished, but the ethical and personal dilemmas endure, much like the art of the man who created them.

This new edition, with an insightful foreword by Bloomberg’s Matt Levine, marks the fiftieth anniversary of a wonderful book out of print for decades until now.

Arthur R. G. Solmssen (1928-2018) was born in New York City to Marguerite and Kurt Solmssen, both from prominent German banking families. Two months later they took their new baby home to Berlin, but by 1936 Germany was firmly in the grip of Adolf Hitler, and Arthur's family, which had Jewish ancestry, left to settle in the Philadelphia area. There, starting at the age of eight, Arthur learned English at the Miquon School and Lower Merion High School.At Harvard he reviewed films for the Crimson but took time out for Army service at the end of the Second World War, finally graduating in 1950. After law school at the University of Pennsylvania, he spent his working life at the firm now known as Saul Ewing. Despite his demanding career as a securities lawyer, he made time to write novels, book reviews and op-ed pieces. "I don't play golf, tennis or squash," he explained to the New York Times in 1982, "and I don't play bridge or mow the lawn."Arthur Solmssen's psychological acuity and broad knowledge of the world-gifts of value to attorneys and storytellers alike-were apparent in all of his books. But the full range of his novelistic powers is on display in The Comfort Letter.