Film and theatre Hitchcock wrote a screenplay (under the name Jane C. Stanton) for the 1974 film
Our Time, directed by
Peter Hyams. The film was set in 1955 at an all-girls boarding school in Massachusetts and dealt with the issue of abortion in a privileged setting. In 1977, Paramount released
First Love, a film written by Hitchcock who shared credit with
David Freeman, and was directed by
Joan Darling. In 1981,
The American Place Theatre produced Hitchcock's play
Grace under the direction of Peter Thompson. The
Off-Broadway play was Hitchcock's "first professional New York City production." In 1983, another play by Hitchcock, a
farce entitled
Bhutan, was staged at the South Street Theater in
Manhattan. Hitchcock's theatrical adaptation titled
The Custom of the Country, based on
Edith Wharton's
novel by the same name, was staged by
Shakespeare & Company at
The Mount, Wharton's former home in
Lenox, Massachusetts. In September 1985, the play was staged by the
Second Stage Theatre under the direction of
Daniel Gerroll. In 1990, Hitchcock's
Vanilla, a play directed by
Harold Pinter, was staged at London's
Lyric Theatre.
Novels Vowing not to rely on the "aid of actors and a director," Hitchcock changed mediums from plays to novels. In 1992, she published her first novel,
Trick of the Eye, which was received with what William Norwich, of
The New York Times, described as positive reviews. as well as the
Edgar Award. The
murder mystery novel is narrated from the point of view of the protagonist Faith Crowell, an artist "who specializes in
trompe l'oeil art" and is employed as a decorator to the rich. Crowell is hired to redecorate a ballroom originally designed for the coming-out party of her patron's daughter, who was murdered a few years after the debutante ball. Hitchcock published ''The Witches' Hammer
in 1994. Her third novel Social Crimes'' was released in 2002. In June 2005, Hitchcock published the sequel to
Social Crimes which was titled
One Dangerous Lady. The author and journalist
Dominick Dunne, a friend of Hitchcock's who received an early copy, wrote in the April 2005 issue of
Vanity Fair that he was amused by the resemblance he himself bears to the description of the murder victim in the novel, who is "bludgeoned to death." At the end of June 2009, Hitchcock published
Mortal Friends, a novel set in
Washington D.C. As part of the promotions for the book, she was interviewed by
Bob Schieffer on the
CBS News show
Washington Unplugged. Joanne Kaufman in
The Wall Street Journal describes
Mortal Friends as a "briskly entertaining". In 2017, Hitchcock announced that she was working on her sixth novel,
Bluff, which was connected to her then newly found passion for
poker. and competed in the
World Poker Tour and the
World Series of Poker.
Bluff was released by
Poisoned Pen in April 2019. The novel was the winner of the 2019
Hammett Prize, awarded by the International Association of Crime Writers. == Personal life and death ==