Every professional setting imaginable has been a venue for murder most foul. In the Golden Age alone, there was the Church: Agatha Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage. The ad agency: Dorothy L. Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise. The hospital: Christianna Brand’s Green for Danger. Academia: Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes. And the law: Ngaio Marsh’s Death at the Bar. (The author had some fun with this title—the murdered barrister is killed in a pub while playing darts.)
The art world, too, is a favorite setting for homicide. I’ll begin with my favorite genre and a contrasting pair of Victorian mysteries: one dark, one light.
James Wilson, The Dark Clue
In James Wilson’s The Dark Clue, the mystery is Britain’s celebrated painter, J.M.W. Turner. Lady Eastlake, the wife of the National Gallery’s director, asks artist Walter Hartright to write a biography of the enigmatic Turner. Hartright’s sister-in-law, Marian Halcombe, agrees to assist in the research. The investigators’ names may ring a bell: James Wilson borrows his characters from Wilkie Collins’s The Lady in White.
The Dark Clue is more Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness than Collins’s Victorian thriller, but the appropriation of Hartright and Halcombe is a brilliant conceit. The upright, honorable Walter and the shrewd, commonsensical Marian lose themselves as they follow Turner’s trail, uncovering details of his secret, unsavory life. Hartright, in particular, is unmoored by his voyage into Victorian England’s dark underbelly. Late in the novel, Lady Eastlake tells Marian, “There is undoubtedly something disturbing about Turner.” She adds, “I should probably have warned your brother.” Indeed.
Diane Freeman, An Art Lover’s Guide to Paris and Murder
An Art Lover’s Guide to Paris and Murder (2024) by Diane Freeman is the seventh book in the delightful Countess of Harleigh series. The novel delivers what readers want in cozy suspense: humor, clever plotting, and a beguiling amateur sleuth—Frances, an American-born countess (now Mrs. George Hazelton). She heads to Paris with her new husband on a trip that mixes business and pleasure, combining an investigation into the painter Paul Ducasse’s death with a visit to the 1900 Paris Exposition.
Was the artist’s death suspicious? It seems likely when someone murders his former lover. The victim is Frances’ aunt-by-marriage, who had summoned George to Paris to investigate the painter’s death. Her daughter, the child of the dead artist, may be the killer’s next target. It’s a pleasure to be led through the mystery’s paces by the humorous, sharp-eyed Frances. And Fin de siècle Paris is the perfect setting for this savory soufflé—a dish that can fall flat in lesser hands. Freeman’s touch is as deft as ever.
Paula Hawkins, The Blue Hour
Does anyone do dread better than Paula Hawkins? The Blue Hour (2024), her fourth psychological thriller, is a quieter story than Hawkins’ sensational debut, The Girl on the Train. This novel’s macabre menace creeps insidiously, opening with a polite but unsettling letter from a forensic anthropologist to the Tate Modern. The exhibit label for a mixed-media sculpture by the late Vanessa Chapman is wrong: the bone in the piece is human, not animal. Ten years before her death, the artist’s philandering, parasitic husband disappeared without a trace. Could the fragment be his?
The story unfolds along two timelines and in three points of view. Art historian James Becker is searching for Chapman’s missing pieces and papers. Dr. Grace Haswell, the artist’s companion, stands in his way. Vanessa Chapman speaks to the reader in diary excerpts and letters curated by Grace. The Blue Hour is about obsession: Becker with the artist’s work, Grace with Vanessa, Vanessa with her art and secrets. Where it’s all heading seems clear enough: a confrontation on Eris, the isolated island battered by the “terrible chaos” of wind and waves where Chapman spent her final years. Still, what happens in the novel’s final moments—at the blue hour, before the stars appear, and color vanishes from sea and sky—jolts.
B.A. Shapiro, The Art Forger
In The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro, Claire Roth makes an honest living out of faking art. She works for a fine art reproduction company; her specialty is copying old master oil paintings. It’s a soulless way to stay barely solvent after a scandal derailed her career. Claire’s prospects look bleak until the owner of Boston’s hottest gallery approaches her with a startling proposal. Will Claire paint a perfect copy of a (fictional) missing Degas, stolen with others from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum? It’s the art world’s most storied unsolved heist. The caper isn’t a con against the museum; it’s a plot to swindle the crooks and bring the painting home . . . or so Claire thinks. When the gallerist dangles a fat check and the promise of a one-woman show, she agrees.
Of course, things are never what they seem in an art forgery story. And B.A. Shapiro layers in a second mystery: a century-old puzzle involving Isabella Stewart Gardner and Edgar Degas. Shapiro’s details—the twisty plot and the techniques for faking a painting—fascinate. It combines artistry, chemistry, and a spot of canvas-baking in Claire’s oven. When the scheme goes off the rails, finding the original Degas may be the only way Claire stays out of prison.
Art Finkel, The Art Thief
The Art Thief by Michael Finkel is a terrific true crime story that reads like a novel. Stéphane Breitwieser and Anne-Catherine Kleinklauss, a pair of twenty-something lovers, stole 239 artworks from European castles, museums, and galleries. That’s about one theft every two weeks in a streak that stretched from 1994 to 2001. The accumulated hoard totaled an estimated two billion dollars.
Their technique was surprisingly simple. To look the part of well-heeled art lovers, they sourced designer clothing from second-hand shops. The thieves preyed on small collections with unsophisticated security. Often, Breitweiser simply reached into a case and tucked a treasure into his pocket or waistband. The reader knows that the Bonnie and Clyde of fine art thievery are nabbed in the end. The mystery Finkel unpacks is motivation. The French thieves hadn’t a centime between them, yet they never sold a single piece.
E.C.R. Lorac, Checkmate to Murder
For Golden Age masters, the puzzle’s artful artifice is paramount. Their clues converge, like a painting’s elements at the vanishing point. The most diabolically clever crafters are the Four Queens of Crime: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh. I’ll begin with a fifth, uncrowned queen, E.R.C. Lorac. She never matched the others’ fame; happily, the British Library Crime Classics has republished nine of her over sixty mysteries.
Checkmate to Murder (1944) is a reverse “locked room” mystery: the murderer strikes from a painter’s studio full of people, but no one notices. The group includes brother-and-sister artists, two chess players intent on their gameboard, and an actor sitting for a portrait garbed in a cardinal’s red robes. A special constable bangs on the door, shattering the atmosphere of intense concentration. The young soldier he has in custody shot the artists’ landlord in an upstairs bedroom, he says. Impossible, Detective Chief Inspector Macdonald proves, leaving the studio party as the only suspects on the spot.
There is a “locked down” element to the story, too. The setting is London during the Blitz on a night when the capital is fogged in and blacked out. Strange, but no one in the studio heard the shot. CDI Macdonald observes that those who survived the worst of the bombing learned to dismiss “unessential bangs.” Lorac’s canny sleuth also has a knack for ignoring the incidental and getting to the essence of things.
Agatha Christie, After the Funeral
Tolstoy wrote, “Happy families are all alike.” Gather unhappy families in an Agatha Christie, and the likely end is murder. In After the Funeral, Christie assembles Richard Abernethie’s kin for the reading of his will. As the six satisfied heirs prepare to leave, one—the artsy, eccentric Cora Lansquenet—tosses a grenade. “But he was murdered, wasn’t he?” Something her brother said at their last meeting makes her suspect foul play; something Cora leaves unsaid. The following afternoon, someone takes an axe to her head.
Cora, an indifferent painter and the widow of an equally mediocre one, collected art but lacked an eye for it. Little wonder the homicidal burglar left the awful pictures behind. Enter Hercule Poirot, Christie’s famous sleuth. He scrapes away the layers, exposing the heirs’ shady alibis and deceptions. The novel ends with a classic Christie drawing room reveal of a murder that’s a masterpiece of misdirection.
Margery Allingham, The Death of a Ghost
Margery Allingham’s The Death of a Ghost opens in the art gallery of a celebrated painter. The swashbuckling artist John Lefcadio left an extraordinary legacy after his death: twelve crated paintings. One is unpacked and exhibited yearly, keeping the Lefcadio legend evergreen. At the eighth exhibit, the lights go out, someone stabs the dead artist’s protege, and a second death follows. Margery Allingham’s gentleman sleuth, Albert Campion, is on hand to sort the murders.
Campion first appears in the 1920s as a minor character and something of a joke: a parody of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey. He’s Bertie Wooster with a detective’s magnifying glass, a figure fit for a frivolous era. His gravitas grows with the gravity of the passing decades. Death of a Ghost marks Campion’s sixth appearance. Here, he’s evolved into a shrewd, sharp-eyed risktaker, offering himself as bait to trap a killer.
Ngaio Marsh, Artists in Crime
In Artists in Crime, Ngaio Marsh’s Chief Inspector Roderick Alleyn and the painter Agatha Troy “meet tart” aboard ship. Troy is paint-smeared, prickly as a chestnut burr, and is “filthily rude” to Alleyn. Never mind: the sleuth is smitten. The detective gets a second chance with Troy when he’s assigned to investigate a death in her art class studio. Someone artfully arranged a model’s murder when she posed as a stabbing victim for a book illustration. Alleyn suspects blackmail is behind the death and has a surfeit of suspects among the artists on hand with secrets to hide.
Ngaio March studied painting in her native New Zealand, where she exhibited for decades with an avant-garde group of artists. She brings a painter’s eye to her descriptions of place and gifts her inspector with acute powers of observation. Artists in Crime opens with a description of Fiji’s Sula Harbor as seen through Alleyn’s eyes. He describes the “violence” of colors, the “vivid magenta against the arsenic green of a pile of fresh bananas.” Policeman as well as painters are trained to look.
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