by Larry WithamTHIS LONG LITERARY TRADITION GAINED MOMENTUM SINCE THE 1970s
BEFORE KEN FOLLETT rose to fame as an author of
international thrillers, he wrote an art caper. He has described it as a
“lighthearted crime story.” It was titled The
Modigliani Scandal (1976) and it suggests that the seventies was a kind of
curtain-raiser for mystery writers putting art and artists into their plots.
The
tradition goes back further in time, of course. Although Edgar Allen
Poe—inventor of the detective and mystery genre—never employed the art topic,
there were others in his century (Hawthorne, Melville, and James) who used
portrait paintings as a pivot for psychological mysteries: The portraits
forebode an ill fate for the characters.
After writing
my own “art mystery,” I researched the history of novels in which artists and
art are central. Of the nearly two hundred that I have found, the greatest
number falls into the literary or historical fiction category.
Even so,
the so-called art mystery has its venerable place. It has had two spurts in the
twentieth century, beginning in the 1930s with the golden age of British detective
fiction. The “queens of crime”—Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers,
Margery Allingham—all produced at least once plot that involved artists and
paintings as clues, victims, or culprits, with Marsh having the record (since she
had studied painting in art school).
Then in the
1970s the art caper truly blossoms. Though not exactly a mystery, the 1972
novel The Eiger Sanction introduced
the protagonist Dr. Jonathan Hemlock, an art history professor. He also
moonlighted as an assassin to earn money to buy stolen paintings. This was the
satirical creation of the American writer Trevanian (Rodney Whitaker), who was spoofing
the James Bond genre. Still, it was taken seriously and became a best-seller. The
second Hemlock adventure, The Loo
Sanction (1973), was equally satirical and goes even further in portraying
the zany contemporary art world.
If
Trevanian and Follett got the ball rolling in the 1970s, there are several
other reasons why art mysteries began to take off. One is our increased
knowledge about Nazi looting of art during WWII and the return of that art to
victims. What better mystery than tracking down a masterpiece stashed in a salt
mine by Hitler’s minions? Today, novels with the Nazi looting element are
legion.
Another
energizing factor was the boom in “contemporary art,” which is dated to the
seventies (as a splinter off of “modern art”). Contemporary art is flamboyant
and 1960’s-rebellious. It introduced concept art, performance art, feminist
art, video art, and mixed these with the new music, urban, and drug culture.
And the flamboyance was just the start.
Contemporary
art began to sell for astronomical amounts of money at auctions. (All the “old
masters” art was already bought up around the world). This stunning rise in
value led to a surge in art crime: forgery of modern art, theft, and art-market
manipulation. What a goldmine for crime fiction! The result has been ever-new
variations on the forgery and theft theme, usually with a murder opening the
story.
Then came
the real-life serial killers. They reached newspaper headlines and soon became
a favorite topic for novelists. Why not an artist as a serial killer? Only a
deranged painter, for example, could leave clues in the form of corpses posed
like famous works of art.
Art
forgery, of course, is not really new. It goes back to the Renaissance. The
same goes with art theft. Looting paintings was a specialty of Napoleon well
before Hitler. For today’s novelists, however, a much more recent round of
historical cases has offered good material for plots and technical
descriptions.
More than a
few novelists have drawn on the story of the Dutch artist who developed
chemical techniques to forge Vermeer paintings that fooled the Nazis. We also
have the struggling British painter who, in the 1980s, forged countless modern
works. Since the 1970s, moreover, antiquity smuggling had prospered. Dramatic
thefts hit European museums. And in 1990, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
in Boston was robbed of several old masters, which are still missing.
In the wake
of these trends, the Italians formed the world’s first “art squad.” Other
countries followed, and now have a new breed of detective, the so-called “art
cop.” These new art sleuths, and many of the real cases, have now been morphed
into novels.
Detectives
are virtually absent from historical fiction about art, as illustrated by a
genre of blockbusters ranging from Irving Stone’s life of Van Gogh (Lust for Life, 1934) to Tracy
Chevalier’s 1999 novel about Vermeer, Girl
with a Pearl Earring. There are exceptions, though. In one recent novel,
the painter Cezanne is a suspect when his model is killed. Leonardo da Vinci
has also been embroiled in a detective plot.
Through the
1990s, publishers and authors began to catch on. Since then, they have produced
several “series” of art mysteries that feature a recurring, likable sleuth.
Series novels have been published as “art historical,” “artworld,” “art
lover’s,” “bodies of art,” and “art gallery” mysteries. Another half dozen go
simply by the protagonist’s name: See the Chris Norgren, Joanna Stark, Tim
Simpson, and Fred Taylor art mysteries, to name a few. They’re all art experts
who solve crimes.
The
challenge of every mystery novel is to avoid clichés, those cookie-cutter plots
in which only the names and locations are changed. The clever use of art crime has
become another tool to create something new, both in plot and atmosphere. Some
novelists specialize in this. Others use it once and move on. And we do see
some clichés emerging, as expected.
Nevertheless,
if reviews of art mysteries at Amazon and Goodreads are any indication, many
readers have little knowledge of the art world, and thus find that part of the
novel the most revelatory. If that remains true, the art mystery genre will
have a future.
(This blog was first posted at
Omnimysterynews.com).
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