Stephanie Kane--A Perfect Eye

DEBORAH CROMBIE: We are having an arty week here on Jungle Red! I've always been fascinated by books centered on art, whether it's heists or scams of clever forgeries. And when stakes AND egos are high, you have a perfect recipe for misdeeds of the highest order. Add a French Impressionist to the mix, and I am totally hooked! Here are some startling facts--and a helluva story, from author Stephanie Kane!

 STEPHANIE KANE-- My Favorite Criminal

It’s estimated that twenty percent of the art in museums today is fake. That’s roughly one in five paintings hanging on the wall. How do forgers get away with it? I care because as a crime writer, I’m always looking for a good crime. That means an interesting criminal.

Not that I’m promiscuous. I do have standards. Sex and money may be the root of all crime, but a purely financial motive doesn’t do it for me. I like my crime straight, not with a dose of humor; capers and heists are out no matter how clever they are. Nor do I like gratuitous sex or violence. My crimes need a psychological motive, the more twisted the better. And the criminal has to be be self-defeating. The seeds of his downfall must be embedded in the obsession itself.

In A PERFECT EYE, a landscape by Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte becomes the template for a murder. To ignite a grievance powerful enough to kill, the painting had to mean something personal to the killer. What kind of guy gets that torqued over a landscape? That led me to forgers. It turns out the best ones don’t do it for the money. They do it to make a point.

The classic art forger is a failed artist who is frustrated by the art world’s refusal to recognize his genius. He gets his revenge by showing how easily the “experts” are fooled. But once he proves his superiority by getting away with it, it isn’t enough. Now he wants credit. Forgers are twisted and self-defeating, but my criminal still needed one more thing. I had to relate to him personally.

When I was a lawyer, the client who gave me nightmares wasn’t the one who decapitated a kid in a low-slung sportscar when the hitch on his trailer failed; at least he was remorseful. My nightmare was an ordinary con man. Con men thrive on marks. They’ll leave $100 on the table to cheat you out of $10. Because lawyers want to believe in their clients, they are prime marks. I certainly was. And he knew it.

My con man sabotaged his case just because he could. I dreaded our interactions. By the time I got him a deal for restitution and counseling, I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. Sensing my discomfort, at the last minute he nixed the deal. I was able to get out of the case only after he stiffed me on my fee. But for a novelist, revenge can be sweet.

When I plugged my revulsion for that con man into my forger, he started to become real. A forger is a human shell. Like a con man without a mark, he’s nothing without a real artist to copy. Which brought me to how he does it.

Unsurprisingly, some forgers glory in their work. They even write books about it. A real forger, Eric Hebborn, was more than generous with his tips in The Art Forger’s Handbook. The first step is mastering technique.

As with a con, the art is in the line. A forger’s lines are as fundamental as a painter’s touch.

Experts look for a flowing line in one part of a drawing or painting and a hesitant one elsewhere. When Hebborn tried to make a forgery too faithful to the original, his line was halting—too deliberate and precise. He sped it up and it began to flow. Spontaneity mimics the throes of creation.

The second step is creating a convincing backstory. The art world calls that provenance. An unbroken chain of title from the time the artist completed a painting is rare; gaps in the chain are the rule. For a forger, each gap is an opportunity to salt the record with phony data: letters, diaries, an early sketch of the painting itself. How would my forger create a false provenance? Gustave Caillebotte was a forger’s dream.

When Caillebotte died at age 45, he left just a small body of work. He’d inherited wealth, and unlike Monet, Renoir or Degas, he never had to paint to sell. He was also intensely private. He left no journals or diaries, but in 1883 from his countryside estate he wrote to Monet about his frustrations with a series of landscapes he was painting: For the two months I have been here I have worked as much as I could—but everything I do is really bad. Caillebotte practically begged a forger to paint one more in the series—a “lost” landscape that would be the breakthrough he so desperately sought.

But could my forger get away with it?  

Gustave Caillebotte, Paris, Rainy Day (The Art Institute of Chicago)

Authentication of paintings has traditionally rested on connoisseurship, the so-called “eye” of an art historian or dealer who has expertise in the artist’s work. Forensic tests can be expensive, destructive and non-definitive, and a forger can beat them with period materials. Centuries-old canvasses can be found in flea markets throughout Europe; in his book, Hebborn provides a recipe for boiling acorns to make iron gall ink. It goes back to the expert’s eye. Who doesn’t want to find a lost Impressionist masterpiece? And having found one, why let it go?

Now it’s game on. Hubris and clashing egos put criminal and victim on a par, and the line between good and evil blurs. As he craves recognition from a world he despises, the forger’s dodgy moral code kicks in. People believe what they want to believe. As the con man says, there’s a sucker born every minute. In a world where perception so often trumps truth, my forger could pull it off. The one thing he might not count on is a paintings conservator with a perfect eye of her own.

Like I said, revenge is sweet. 

DEBS: I love the Caillebotte painting above, owned by the Art Institute of Chicago. Reds and readers, do you have a favorite art-related crime novel? Share with us, and chat with Stephanie!

 

Stephanie Kane is a lawyer and award-winning author of four crime novels. Born in Brooklyn, she came to Colorado as a freshman at CU. She owned and ran a karate studio in Boulder and is a second-degree black belt. After graduating from law school, she was a corporate partner at a top Denver law firm before becoming a criminal defense attorney. She has lectured on money laundering and white collar crime in Eastern Europe, and given workshops throughout the ountry on writing technique.

She lives in Denver with her husband and two black cats. Extreme Indifference and Seeds of Doubt won a Colorado Book Award for Mystery and two Colorado Authors League Awards for Genre Fiction. She belongs to Mystery Writers of America, Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers and the Colorado Authors League. CONNECT WITH STEPHANIE KANE ONLINE WEBSITE: writerkane.com

Rhys flies by the seat of her pants.

RHYS BOWEN: There are two types of writers: the outliners and the pantsers. The former plot out entire books. They do character studies and know what they are going to write about before they start.
The latter (which include me) fly by the seat of their pants.  We start knowing almost nothing. We begin writing and hope a story will materialize. And strangely enough it always seems to.

I always know the environment in which I want to set the mystery. I s.ay to myself 'wouldn't it be fun to set a story within the art world of the Paris post-Impressionists and send Molly there? Then I find a way to do it. don't always know who is going to be murdered or whodunit. 

I have now written thirty one mysteries and I am still in a complete state of panic for the first fifty pages. I am plagued with doubts--will this really turn into a good story? What if I say everything I want to in less that one hundred pages? What if I can't finish it? So I stumble along and then my characters start taking over and I find myself tiptoeing after Molly or Georgie, anxious to see what scrapes they are going to get themselves into this time.

I realize that writing an outline first would make life more comfortable for me. But I'm afraid that once I got the storyline down on paper I'd lose interest. And I'd know what was going to happen. I'd be the puppet master, forcing my characters to obey my will. The way I write I'm as surprised and excited as Molly or Georgie when strange things happen and we go off on tangents, when there is a knock on the door and an unexpected person is standing there.

I've just reached that blissful hundred page mark on my new Molly book and I'm heaving a sigh of relief. Yes we have a good story and it's going somewhere and it's just up to me to keep up with Molly's pace. The driving idea behind this story is Freud's book on the interpretation of dreams. One of Molly's friends has returned from studying with Freud with Vienna and is called upon to help a young girl who has survived a fire that killed her parents, but remembers nothing of the event. Since then she is plagued by nightmares and it is hoped that they might reveal exactly what happened that night.

I decided to tackle this story as I studied dream psychology at the University of Freiburg in Germany and have been fascinated ever since. It's going to be a very complicated puzzle, tying in with a case that Daniel is working on. I hope that Molly is in top form and able to solve it!

Here's an excerpt I've written this week:

My first impression of her was that I was looking at a French bisque doll with enormous blue eyes and corn-colored hair. She was so pale that she almost merged into the whiteness of the pillows behind her head. She sat up and looked at us with apprehension as we crowded into her small bedroom.

                “Hello Polly.” Gus took the initiative. “I’m Augusta, and these are my friends Molly and Elena.  Your aunt asked us to come because we heard you’d been having nightmares since the awful tragedy.  Your aunt wondered if I could help you, because I’ve been learning about how to interpret dreams.”

                “My aunt told me,” Polly said.

                “May I sit down?” Gus said, pulling up a chair beside the bed. “And my friends can sit on the window seat in the sun, unless you’d prefer that they wait in another room while we have our talk?”

                “It’s all right. They can stay,” Polly said in a resigned voice.

                We sat.  Shafts of sunlight painted stripes on the flowered wallpaper, highlighting the only color in the otherwise white room.

                I could tell that Gus didn’t know how to begin.

                “Polly,” I said. “We were so sorry to learn about your parents.  What an awful thing to have lived through. It’s no wonder you are having bad dreams."

She sat in silence for a while then she said,  “I can’t believe they are gone. I just didn’t believe it when Aunt Minnie told me. I mean, not my Papa. How could it be? He was so big and strong. I keep expecting to hear the front door slam and his big voice yelling, “Where’s my Pollywog?”

She looked down at her sheet, smoothing it with a tiny white hand.  “I keep asking myself ‘how could I get out and he didn’t?”

“You don’t remember getting out?” Gus said. “Maybe there was a fire escape outside your window and not outside theirs?”

She shook her head. “It was the other way around. The fire escape was outside their window, not mine.  And I don’t remember anything at all. Not the fire. Not getting out. Nothing until I woke up and these faces were over me and someone said ‘she’s alive. God be praised.’”

“So how do you think you got out?” Gus asked.

“I’ve no idea. Unless I walked in my sleep. “

“Do you walk in your sleep sometimes?” Gus asked.

“Sometimes. I used to more when I was little. But how could I not have woken up if there was a fire and flames all around me?”

“Polly, is it possible that you walked in your sleep and….” I started to say, then shut up again. “No, never mind. It’s not important.”  I had been going to ask whether she might have knocked over their lamp by accident or even lit a match, tried to light a fire, and all without knowing it. But I realized as I said it that this was a burden I couldn’t lay on her. She was already carrying enough guilt that she had lived and they had not.

There was another awkward silence that seemed to go on forever.

“Tell me about your mother, Polly,” Sid said. “You must miss her dreadfully.”

Polly pressed her lips together and I could tell she was willing herself not to cry. “ Mama was so soft and gentle. She always used to braid my hair for me. Aunt Mnnie never does it right and she jerks my head with the hairbrush. Mama never did. And she let me climb into bed with them when I had bad dreams.”

“Have you always had bad dreams?” Gus asked.

“I’ve had them sometimes, you know, the way one does. But not like this. These are so vivid and horrible and when I wake up I don’t know whether I’m awake or asleep and what is real and what is not.”

                “Can you tell me about any of them?” Gus asked.

                “It’s hard.” Polly looked flustered now. “They are so real at the time but when I try to remember, it’s all so unclear.”

                “Tell me about the first one,” Gus said gently. “What is the one thing you remember—the one thing that made you afraid.”

                “The snake,” Polly said firmly. “There is always the snake.”

 

BEAUTIFUL DREAMER will be published March 2015. And if you need a Molly fix before then, CITY OF DARKNESS AND LIGHT comes out in four weeks time, on March 4th. (and yes, it's the one where Molly goes to Paris)