It occurred to me that several of the mystery novels I've been reading involve artists as either suspects or victims, and I thought that might be worth exploring as I continue to read through my collection. I'll be looking at each story involving one or more artists to see whether they seem genuine or phony. And I will be adding to this post as I discover more Artists in Crime.
First up would have to be Margery Allingham with The Estate of the Beckoning Lady, featuring Minnie Cassands, a painter who is driven to increasingly increased production levels by an unfortunate quirk in the British tax codes; it seems the more she paints, the more her tax burden increases, and her problems multiply when the local tax agent who's hounding her is found murdered. The art in this is mostly decorative background to the complicated plot.
Agatha Christie involves artists in several of her books. The murder victim in Five Little Pigs is artist Amyas Crayle, whose characteristic absorption in his work contributes to his murder in several ways. Henrietta Saversnake, an artist in The Hollow, uses her sculptural work in an unusual way; she conceals the murder weapon inside the sculpture of a horse. I found these two depictions of artists to be reasonably believable.
Charlotte and Aaron Elkins' Alix London books deal less with artists and more with art conservation, and, thanks to Alix's disgraced father Geoffrey, forgery and fraud in the art world. A former American Art librarian at San Francisco's De Young Museum, Charlotte Elkins knows her way around the art world, and it shows in this series of books. A Dangerous Talent leads Alix London to Santa Fe and Ghost Ranch to examine a painting alleged to be by Georgia O'Keefe that a client is considering buying. A Cruise To Die For finds Alix embroiled with a forged Monet... or was it a Manet? In The Art Whisperer, Alix encounters a jargon spewing art museum director who has a personal vendetta against her, and in The Trouble With Mirrors, her beloved Uncle Tiny may have been involved in the disappearance of a valuable medallion from an Italian museum decades earlier.
R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke is called in to examine ashes of human bone to determine whether they might belong to Peter Gannet, a potter from whose pottery kiln the ashes and bone fragments were recovered. Gannet builds his pieces by hand, scorning use of the pottery wheel; his pieces appear something between a birds nest and a flower pot to the narrator, Dr. Oldfield, but are expounded by art expert Mr. Bunderby as, "this noble and impressive work ...typical of the great artist by whose genius was it created. .... Looking at it, we realized with respectful admiration the wonderful power of analysis, the sensibility--at once subtle and intense--that made its conception possible; and we can trace the deep thought, the profound research--the untiring search for the essential of abstract form." When a viewer says he's not quite clear as to what was meant by 'abstract form', Bunderby replies that "The words 'abstract form,' then evoke in me the conception of that essential, pervading, geometric sub-structure which persists when all the trivial and superficial accidents of mere visual appearances have been eliminated. In short, it is the fundamental rhythm which is the basic aesthetic factor underlying all our abstract conception of spatial limitation. Do I make myself clear?" The questioner naturally retreats in confusion from this flood of nebulous bloviation. But then the moment of truth emerges to Dr. Oldfield when Bunderby presents as Gannet's master work a decorated jar that Dr. Oldfield recognizes as something he himself created by experimenting on the potter's wheel and decorated with indentations from his own latch-key and clinical thermometer and is now being passed off as one of Gannet's hand-built pottery pieces.