Artists In Crime

 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.  

Forrest, Katherine V.

 It's been years since I read any of Katherine V. Forrest's Kate Delafield police procedural novels, so I was pleased to see them next on the list.  

In Amateur City, LAPD homicide detective Kate Delafield arrives at the scene of a homicide in the building of the Modern Office corporation, where an overbearing, much hated manager has been stabbed to death.  The early hour of the murder and building security features limit the pool of suspects to the upper level managers, all of whom had reason to hate the victim.  More than just a routine police procedural, the book explores the internal police culture as it affects lesbian and gay police officers.  Grade:  A.  

Investigating Murder At The Nightwood Bar, homicide detective Kate Delafield finds a young lesbian murdered in the bar's parking lot with her own baseball bat.  Although initially suspicious and unhelpful, the bar's lesbian customers warm up to Kate after she fights off an attempted kidnapping of one of the women by a gang of young homophobes.  WARNING:  this book contains descriptions of sexual child abuse.  Grade:  A.  

Someone has killed a resident of The Beverly Mailbu and sat and watched during the three hours it took him to die.  The victim turns out to have been an informer during the dark days of the McCarthy Communist witch hunt era that affected the lives of many people working in the motion picture industry, including some of the other residents of the building.  Grade:  A.

Sleeping Bones entangles Kate in a web of international intrigue when an ancient fossil is found at the scene of a murder at the tar pits of Rancho La Brea.  Is the fossil real or a fake, and who is it that cares so much about it, anyway?  I found the plot of this one a bit more difficult to believe, but it's still an engrossing mystery.  Grade:  B.  

Evanovich, Janet

I started to re-read Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series, starting with One For The Money, and I just couldn't do it.   I enjoyed the series when I originally read them about twenty years ago, but this time around, I just can't.  The messes Stephanie gets into as a bounty hunter or skip tracer, the waffling between the two attractive men in her life, the old junky car, no, I just can't.  How many times can she get hit over the head before her brain turns to mush?  How much pasta can she eat before the cupcake turns into a muffin top?  The feral giraffe named Kevin roaming the streets of Trenton, New Jersey was a "jump the shark" moment for me even years ago.  I might try one more that I recall as pretty funny before I send the rest of them to the library donation pile and free up some space on my library shelves.  

So I decided to try one of the Lizzy and Diesel books, Wicked Appetite, to see how that series was.  The premise is that Lizzy is a baker of wickedly delicious cupcakes in a Salem, Massachusetts, bakery.  Two men pop up in her life, dark, vampirish Wulf, and beach bum Diesel.  They and Lizzy are all Unmentionables, people with special abilities.  The two men are seeking one of the seven stones that supposedly control the seven deadly sins.  In this case, the sin is gluttony.  Lizzy ends up working with Diesel to try to find the pieces of the stone before Wulf can find them and therefore the stone and achieve his desire of creating Hell on earth.  I have to say I got tired of this one pretty fast--the shtick stops working and I just get tired of it.  Grade:  D.  

I tried another Lizzy and Diesel book, Wicked Business, but that one's a "nope", too.  So all the Evanovich books are in the bin to donate to the library--maybe someone will like them more than I do.  

Erskine, Margaret

It's been years since I read any of the Margaret Erskine books I have; I had forgotten how interesting they are.  

Detective Inspector Septimus Finch is summoned from New Scotland Yard to investigate the brutal murder of rich, spoiled, narcissistic Lisa Harcourt, The Woman At Belguardo.   Although it looks as if her rejected boy toy did it, other suspects in the form of former lovers, an ex-husband and other people who had reason to hate her are plentiful, too.  Grade:  A.  

Something fishy is going on at No. 9 Belmont Square:  a famous opera tenor has arrived at the run down boarding house filled with elderly ladies in search of his long-lost love and the fabulous diamond she owned.  What he finds instead is at least one murder and possibly more.  It's up to Inspector Finch to sort it out before there are even more murders.  I found the plot of this one complicated and unlikely.  And note to authors:  please, please, PLEASE don't send young women out on dodgy errands to empty buildings on foggy evenings.  Grade:  C.  

I found the Case With Three Husbands convoluted and confusing.  I never did figure out all the complicated family relationships, and frankly didn't care.  Grade:  C.  

Inspector Finch has been temporarily seconded to a London suburb where crime tends to be of the white-collar, financial type rather than murder in Harriet Farewell, when a local resident is shot under the cover of a Guy Fawkes Night fireworks display.  The leading suspect if poor, mad Harriet Buckler, just out of a mental hospital where she has been since her son died in a car accident two years earlier.  Now she wanders the grounds of the family estate, gun in hand, and may have shot her blackmailing mother-in-law.  Grade:  A.  

Elkins, Charlotte and Aaron--Alix London books

 I had to give this series of books their own page just because I've enjoyed them so much.  

Alix London, daughter of disgraced art conservator and master forger Geoffrey London, is trying to pick of the pieces of her fledgling career in the Seattle art world after her father's trial and imprisonment for fraud in A Dangerous Talent.  She's been hired by nouveau riche art collector Chris LeMay to evaluate a painting alleged to be by Georgia O'Keefe that Chris is thinking of buying.  Alix and Chris fly to Santa Fe, but before they even get a good look at the painting someone has attempted to kill Alix and has succeeded in murdering the gallery owner.  If that's not enough, Alix has to deal with a snooty art dealer (or is he really?) and try to sort out her feelings about her father, who is out of prison and has now resurfaced in her life.   Caution:  this book moves along at a cracking pace, don't start reading it just before bedtime, you'll be up all night finishing it.  Ask me how I know this.  Grade:  A+

Now working as a consultant for the FBI's Art Fraud team, Alix is sent on A Cruise To Die For aboard the super-yacht of Greek multimillionaire Panos Papadakis to gather information about a Ponzi scheme he's running involving fractional investments in art works.  Alix's job is to give informal talks to a group of wealthy investors before an on-board art auction as the yacht cruises around the Greek isles, but she's barely on board before she's cracked over the head and a famous Manet is slashed before she can even get a good look at it.  Grade:  A.  

A nasty campaign of negative reviews of Alix's modest little book on painting conservation threatens to undermine her budding career as she sets off to work on three paintings destined for auction by a Palm Springs museum in The Art Whisperer.  When she is murderously attacked after expressing doubts about the authenticity of the museum's recently acquired Jackson Pollack painting, and the well-hated senior curator of the museum is killed, it's apparent that something is very wrong at the museum.  Grade:  A.  I had to give this series of books their own page just because I've enjoyed them so much.  

The Trouble With Mirrors, as Alix London discovers, is that sometimes they're not what they seem to be.  A mirror given to her years ago by her beloved Zio Beni, AKA her father's art forger friend Tiny, has been stolen from her apartment just days after it's shown in a photograph on the cover of Art World Insider magazine.  Not only that, but Tiny himself has disappeared and may even have Genoese Mafia hoodlums after him.  What else can Alix do but try to find him herself and discover the secret of the mirror?  This is another one you shouldn't start reading just before bedtime.  Grade A+.  

Elkins, Charlotte and Aaron--Lee Ofsted books

 Golfer Lee Ofsted, a "rabbit" or newbie professional on the Women's Professional Golf League tour, finds the body of a friend dumped in a water hazard in A Wicked Slice.  When it appears that someone is going out of their way to make it look like Lee was the one who put it there, she decides to poke into things for herself.  I've always enjoyed the behind-the-scenes look into the world of professional golf.  Grade:  A 

Rookie golfer Lee Ofsted is in the unaccustomed position of leading the WPGL tournament in New Mexico, when she discovers the body of an apparent victim of a lightening strike in Rotten Lies.  Unfortunately, Lee's efforts to revive the man aggravates an injury to her arm, putting her out of the tournament.  When medical examination shows that the death was a homicide, Lee is once again drawn into a murder investigation.  Grade:  B.  

Elkins, Aaron

Gideon Oliver, Skeleton Detective books

Honeymooning in England in Murder In The Queen's Armes, anthropologist Gideon Oliver, known as the Skeleton Detective, visits a small museum in Dorset, only to discover that the 30 thousand year old skull fragment of Poundbury Man, known among anthropologists as "Pummy", has been stolen from the museum.  When Pummy turns up again on the site of a dig being conducted a few miles away by a friend of Gideon's, murder ensues.  I like the fact that Elkins uses knowledge from his own career as a physical anthropologist in his mysteries, but manages to keep it reasonably accessible for the reader.  Grade:  B.  

Gideon Oliver thought accompanying his wife Julie to Alaska for a training class for park rangers at a remote lodge would be a nice vacation, but finds himself bored out of his mind, at least until human bones are released from the Icy Clutches of a nearby glacier.  When Gideon is asked to determine whether the bones are those of a team of botanists killed in an avalanche thirty years before, he finds that they are, but that at least one of the team was murdered.  Complicating this is the presence of the sole survivor of the avalanche, prominent television scientist M. Audley Tremaine, two other scientists who were on the expedition, and a group of the relatives of the three people killed in the avalanche.  When Tremaine is killed and the manuscript of his "tell all" book stolen, it appears that the killer is among those present at the lodge. Grade:  B.  

Gideon and his friend FBI agent John Lau travel to Tahiti to the plantation where members of John's extended family grow Paradise's Blue Devil, the world's most expensive coffee, at the invitation John's uncle to investigate the suspicious death of a family member in Twenty Blue Devils.  Except that when they get there, they're told they're not needed, nothing to investigate, nothing to see here, thank you.  Naturally, this does not sit well with either Gideon or John.  Grade:  B.  

On vacation in Hawaii, Gideon is invited by John Lau to meet members of the Torkelson family, old friends of his who own one of the largest cattle ranches on the Big Island of Hawaii in Where There's A Will.  The gathering is interrupted by the news that an airplane, missing for ten years, has been discovered in a lagoon on a remote Pacific atoll, and is believe to contain the remains of Magnus Torkelson, missing since anonymous hit men killed his brother Torkel and burned down the ranch hay barn to conceal the crime.  At least that's the story the family is telling, until it isn't.  Grade:  B. 

 Gideon makes a joking comment to a reporter that his upcoming speech to promote his new book about archeological scams, hoaxes and frauds will reveal an even bigger fraud than that of Piltdown Man; the reporter takes the comment seriously and spreads the news worldwide so that all the attendees at a conference celebrating the discovery of Gibraltar Woman and Gibraltar Boy are expecting great revelations from him in Uneasy Relations.  Gideon himself tries to downplay it, until someone tries to push him off the Rock of Gibraltar.  Grade: B.