Freeman, R. Austin

 Once again I started these out of chronological order, but oh, well, it's my party and I'll read them in whatever order I want.  

R. Austin Freeman was the creator of Dr. John Thorndyke, who remains preeminent among the scientific forensic detectives.  Thorndyke is both a lawyer and a medical doctor who maintains his own laboratory where he can scientifically test materials and substances found at crime scenes.  

One of Freeman's earlier Thorndyke books, The Eye of Osiris, first published in 1911, finds Dr. Berkeley, a young colleague of Thorndyke's, involved with members of a family reduced to poverty by the bizarre will of an uncle who disappeared under suspicious circumstances two years earlier.  When bones appear on the uncle's property,  Berkeley calls on Thorndyke's legal knowledge as well as his scientific abilities to sort the matter out.  Grade:  A.  

The Stoneware Monkey, first published in 1939, begins with a narrative by Dr. Oldfield, a young doctor who encounters the murder of a police constable while on a temporary assignment in the country.  In addition to the murder, a sizable quantity of diamonds has been stolen that same night.  Later, the doctor becomes friendly with an artist, Peter Gannet, a potter whose primitively constructed pieces appear to sell unaccountably well.  When Gannet disappears under suspicious circumstances, Dr. Oldfield enlists the help of Dr. Thorndyke in determining whether the ashes of human bone discovered in Peter Gannet's pottery kiln are connected with his disappearance.  The hilarious explanation of modern abstract pottery art alone makes this one worth rereading.  Grade:  A.  

The Penrose Mystery, first published in 1936, finds Dr. Thorndyke, Dr. Jervis, and their associate Mr. Polton searching for a wealthy collector of antiquities, Daniel Penrose, who has disappeared shortly after showing a collection of valuable jewels to a lawyer whom he swears to secrecy.  I found the solution of this case to be bewilderingly complicated and improbable.  Grade:  C.  

Dr. Thorndyke's Discovery, published in 1932, with an alternate title of When Rogues Fall Out, is an "inverted" mystery tale, starting with the commission of the crime and then proceeding to follow its detection.  In this case, there are two crimes; first the disappearance of Mr. Didbury Toke, a collector of art objects and fence of stolen jewelry, then second the murder of Scotland Yard Inspector Badger, a zealous but secretive official investigator.  It takes Thorndyke's special skills to connect the two crimes and apprehend the unknown perpetrator.  Grade:  A.  I have to say this was a difficult book for me to read because the copy I have is a cheap paperback with center gutters so narrow you have to guess at some of the words.  This copy cost $.25 when it was printed, and as Mark Twain said of paying $7 for a five hour Wagner opera at Bayreuth, it was almost too much for the money.  

After slogging through approximately a thousand pages of short stories in The Famous Cases of Dr. Thorndyke, I have to confess some sympathy for Father Ronald Knox's Commandment against elaborate scientific plot devices.  For example, when the location of a crime is determined by the presence on the victim's clothing of a rare, almost extinct mollusk found in only two places in Britain, a fact known to Thorndyke, but not to the reader, this reader is inclined to be a bit cranky.  Thorndyke's absolute refusal to reveal any of his thought process during the case to either Dr. Jervis, his usual Watson, or to the reader until the dénouement, in case after case is irritating.  

I finished off the Thorndyke series with The Unconscious Witness.  Landscape artist Tom Pedley is blissfully paining a rural scene one day when he notices three people walking past; two men and a woman who appears to be following and eavesdropping on the two men's conversation.  A short time later the woman and one of the men return up the path separately, but there's no sign of the third man.  Pedley is intrigued by the eavesdropper and makes a sketch of the three figures, then forgets about it until the police come to question him about the murder of the third man.  A short time later a woman who claims to be an artist, but who has neither taste nor talent, moves into the studio next to Pedley's and begins to try to involve him in an intimate friendship.  I found the plot of this one involved so many coincidences that the whole thing was unbelievable, but the commentary on modern art is pretty funny.  Grade:  C.  

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.  

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.  Update:  And I've added the Chris Norgren books, as well, although these were published under Aaron Elkins's name alone in 1987 and 1993.  

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, published in 2012  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+.  

Update:  Although Charlotte Elkins gets no official credit for the Chris Norgren books, it's pretty clear that no one but art historian and museum curator Charlotte Elkins could have contributed the wealth of detail to these books, so I've included them to this post.  And, as sort of a wink to the reader, several of the characters in the Norgren books, written decades earlier, show up later in several of the London books.  

In A Deceptive Clarity, published in 1987, San Francisco art historian and curator Chris Norgren accepts a temporary assignment in Europe to escape from the details of a painful divorce.  The U.S. Army is sponsoring an exhibit in Berlin called The Plundered Past, featuring art works seized during the war by the Nazis from the collection of wealthy Italian art collector Claudio Bolzano; the art works, including three additional pieces recently found in a salt mine, have been restored to Bolzano by the Army, who may now be changing his mind about allowing them to be exhibited.  When Chris's boss tells him that one of the works may be a forgery, and is then promptly murdered, Chris starts to take the job seriously.  Grade:  A.  

Art historian Chris Norgren is once again jetting off to Europe in Old Scores, this time to Dijon, France, to examine a possible Rembrandt that has been offered to the Seattle Art Museum.  The catch is that he's given a limited amount of time to evaluate the painting's authenticity, and the collector offering the painting is notorious for his ambiguous dealings with the art world.  Grade:  A.