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 step up her production levels by an unfortunate quirk in the British tax codes; it seems the more she paints, the more her tax burden increases, and then 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, but it all sounds good.  A particularly funny bit comes when a teenage relative is seriously disillusioned when he discovers that Minnie's conversation with two important party guests is not about Art, but about money instead.    

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 London, 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 priceless Cellini medallion from an Italian museum decades earlier.  I found all of these to be believable and very entertaining--it's a cracking good series of books.  

R. Austin Freeman's Dr. Thorndyke is called in The Stoneware Monkey 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.  

Freeman also incorporates art and artists in the plot of The Unconscious Witness; landscape painter Tom Pedley witnesses the prelude to murder, then is ensnared in a friendship with a woman claiming to be an artist who has neither taste nor talent.  Her drawing skills are about the level of a nine-year old child, but she's very quick with the current modern art patter.  Freeman's hilarious satire of the jargon of the modern art world is not to be missed.  

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 is 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.