B.A. Shapiro: The highs and lows of publishing

JAN BROGAN - This may be one of the happiest interviews I have ever posted on this blog.  Today, I am welcoming Barbara Shapiro, who I first met 23-years ago in a novel writing class.  We were both aspiring authors and we formed a writer's group. In the years that followed, we have beaten up each other up over structure and prose,  drank champagne over successes, (it became a rule) cried over disappointments (involuntary) and stuck together as others came and left our group. 

Barbara was the first to get published, but after five novels, she hit a  dry spell. For eight years, she couldn't get published and even with this last manuscript, The Art Forger, she heard a lot of rejection.  Inexplicable rejection. The book was terrific, which made the rejection worse. Editors kept saying it didn't fit neatly into one of their genres. After being insanely persistent, Barbara started talking about retiring from this crazy, nonsensical industry.  How much rejection, she asked me, can one person take?

But she had a wonderful agent, Anne Collette of the Rees Agency, who wouldn't give up and one day Barbara got the call we all wait for.  Algonquin Books wanted to publish The Art Forger.  Not much later, it became an in-house favorite. They started to view it as a big book. The publishers planned to send her on a 30-city tour.  Publishers Weekly named The Art Forger as  one of Ten Promising Titles of the 2012 BEA (Book Expo of America), Amazon chose it as Editor's Pick for fall;  The Art Forger was named the number 1 Indie Nextpick for November.

 The Art Forger, which Booklist praised as   “an entrancingly visual, historically rich, deliciously witty, sensuous, and smart tale of authenticity versus fakery," is about down-and-out Boston artist, Claire Roth who subsists on painting reproductions until she gets her big break.  Her big break arrives in the form of an offer from a Newbury Street galley owner and kingmaker who will give her her own show, if she agrees to forge a painting for him.  The painting he wants her to forge is Degas' After The Bath - one of the paintings stolen in the storied Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum heist. 

JAN:  How did you come up with the idea for The Art Forger?

B.A. Shapiro: I started with the idea of writing a novel about Isabella Stewart Gardner, which led me to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist in which $500 million dollars of art was stolen – the largest unsolved art robbery in history – which led me to art theft and art forgery. I suddenly had a book about many things at many different points in time, but no real story nor any idea of how to weave it all together. So I started playing with the idea of a contemporary character who might interact with all of the things I was so fascinated by, and after many iterations I came up with a working outline that became the skeleton for The Art Forger.

 JAN: The novel also interweaves the story of Isabella Gardner's procurement of the Degas painting. How did you handle the  historical and the contemporary stories?

B.A. Shapiro: There actually are three stories in the book: the present story about the eponymous Claire Roth, Claire’s backstory which takes place three years earlier and the story of Isabella Stewart Gardner and Edgar Degas which takes place in the late nineteenth century. I developed each story separately, using charts and diagrams and other such obsessive tools, and then pulled each one apart and put them back together as a whole in which one story pushed the next story forward which pushed the next story forward. It was really fun.

JAN: How much of your own experiences with rejection helped inform the creation of Claire, your struggling protagonist?

B.A. Shapiro: It’s funny, when I was writing the novel, I wasn’t really thinking that Claire’s struggles were mine – I’m a writer after all and she’s an artist – but in retrospect, I’ve got to say that there are strong similarities. So much so that when I was doing the final edits for the book – once it had become clear that my publisher was getting behind it in a major way – I realized that I was experiencing the same emotions Claire had under similar circumstances. I guess I was being a wee bit thick.

JAN: How much do you think moving to Boston from the suburbs may have shaped this novel?

B.A. Shapiro: A lot. In two different ways. The first is that I could suddenly walk to hundreds of museums and art galleries, which I took great advantage of. I visited as many as I could, multiple times, took classes at the MFA and joined a group that wandered museums and galleries with an artist/art historian who opened my eyes to everything art. The second is that we moved to the South End of Boston, home to many artists, which is where Claire lives and works.

JAN: How did you survive the eight years you went unpublished? What kept you going and what advice would you give other authors struggling in this tough market climate?

B.A. Shapiro: The support of my family and my friends as well as a driving desire to tell stories. It wasn’t easy – and I’m not sure “survived” is even the correct term – after five published novels I wrote four more that couldn’t find a home. I was thinking about a career change when The Art Forger was acquired by Algonquin Books after many, many rejections by other publishers. I immediately bagged the change idea and started writing a new novel. As far as advice goes, all I can say is that sometimes – not always – but sometimes when you want something badly enough, it can happen. You’ve just got to get your butt into the chair so that you’re there when it strikes.

JAN: The Art Forger doesn't hit the shelves until mid-October, but you can pre-order it online today.  Barbara will be stopping by to ask any questions you have about the book or how to stay positive in this grueling business. 

One name will be chosen at random from the comments page to receive a free copy of The Art Forger, stop by with your questions or comments for Barbara.

And please come back  tomorrow when John Barylick talks about why he had to write Killer Show, America's Deadliest Rock Concert, a narrative non-fiction account of  The Station Nightclub fire that killed more than 100 people in 2003.  It's like Christmas around here at Jungle Red, three free copies will be given away.

True Crime Tuesday--Vanishing Treasures

HANK: Anthony Amore is a character right out of a suspense thiller. And yet, he's real. He's a world class expert of art security and art theft. He's a lead investigator on the Isabella Stewart Gardner thefts--that's the missing Rembrandt "Storm on the Sea of Galilee" to the left--and more scoop on that below.

(You have to admit, now that they've caught the notorious Whitey Bulger, the Gardner heist is the biggest unsolved mystery in Boston. And there's a reward of five miliion dolalrs for info that leads to the return of the thirteen stolen works of art!)

Anthony Amore will be at Crime Bake--and the inside stuff he knows is quite amazing. For instance--ask him how the bad guys carry a huge paintings out of a museum. His answer will suprise you.

But today...True Crime Tuesday...he takes us inside the world of art theft.

ANTHONY AMORE: Less than a month ago, two valuable paintings—one a portrait of two smiling boys by Frans Hal and the other a landscape by Jacob van Ruysdael—were stolen from a museum in Leerdam in The Netherlands. Amazingly, this crime, in which the thieves made off with a haul valued in the millions of US dollars, received barely a mention in North America. In fact, I had to use an online translation program in order to read about the theft in English. It’s safe to assume that this is at least partly due to the fact that the public is unaware of the enormity of the problem of crimes against art.

HANK: Tell us more! So this goes on all the time? What are some of the most famous cases?

Anthony Amore: Art theft happens much more than one may think. The trafficking of illicit art is a multi-billion dollar “industry” and includes everything from stolen paintings to Egyptian artifacts to rare items from our nation’s history. It ranges from thefts of antique family heirlooms taken from private homes to thefts from internationally known museums, such as the infamous 1990 theft of 13 priceless items from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. That art crime, still unsolved, ranks as the largest property theft in recorded history.

HANK: You investigated that Isabella Stewart Gardner theft. Below is a stolen Degas. Do you think you'll ever discover who did it?

Anthony Amore: Unfortunately, crimes against important cultural property still happen every day. Despite the best efforts of law enforcement and INTERPOL, Europe is a hotbed for stolen art and antiquities. This is true in around the world, and the United States is no different. Art theft is so prevalent in America that in 2004 the Federal Bureau of Investigation formed an Art Crime Team to investigate such losses. However, here in the United States, little emphasis is put on the recovery of lost art at the state and local levels of law enforcement.

The good news is that, at least when it comes to stolen masterpieces, the recovery rate is fairly good. That’s because highly recognizable art is very difficult to move. Thieves who see enormous dollar values often commit crimes of opportunity. But as retired FBI agent Robert Wittman has noted, the true art of art theft is in the moving of the goods, not the heist itself. So, while the bad guys usually prevail when it comes to lesser known works, there is hope for better known items. This is just one of the reasons that I am hopeful for a recovery of the stolen Gardner art.

HANK: How do they get away with it? And do the bad guys usually prevail?

Anthony Amore: Over the past year, investigative reporter Tom Mashberg and I teamed up to examine the problem of art theft by researching all of the thefts of paintings by the great master Rembrandt van Rijn throughout the last century. The result of this research is the basis for our book Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists .

Stealing Rembrandts makes three things abundantly clear: 1) art is not stolen by swashbuckling, debonair thieves on behalf of nefarious billionaires. It is stolen by common crooks, often as a crime of opportunity; 2) stealing high-value art by well-known artists is a fool’s errand because such works are nearly impossible to sell; and 3) prevention against the theft of our priceless cultural treasures, not just the recovery of stolen art, is vitally important. Despite these truths, art remains an attractive target for criminals who are romanced by astronomical values attributed to master works.

HANK: Why did you pick Rembrandt thefts? Is he the most-stolen artist ever?

Anthony Amore: We chose Rembrandt for several reasons. Chief among them was the fact that in my work pursuing the stolen Gardner Rembrandts, I spent considerable time examining how other theft of the great master took place. In seeking out as much information on art crime as I could, I was surprised to see just how often works by Rembrandt have been stolen. Thus, the topic of our book was born. Tom Mashberg, himself no stranger to the pursuit of stolen art, brought his talents for investigative journalism to the project, and we created what we feel is a book that will help the cause of art security for decades to come.

History has proven that, once stolen, thieves have very little success monetizing their booty. Like many of us, they believe the version of life they see on the Hollywood screen, which is based entirely on fantasy, not reality. So, despite the folly of it all, criminals will likely always target art. And that means we have to remain vigilant in our efforts to protect it. An essential part of that is knowing who the culprits are, and who they are not.

One of the more entertaining parts of the book Tom and I wrote deals with the genesis of the myth of “Dr. No.” We examine the origins of the public’s fallacious yet widespread belief that stolen masterpieces now hang on the walls of some master crime figure’s underground lair, there for him to enjoy alone with his brandy snifter. In fact, an investigator is far more likely to find a stolen masterpiece wrapped in a blanket in a storage facility, attic, or basement than he is to find it in a mansion hanging by a fireplace. This is the reality of art theft, and it’s nothing like it is on the big screen.

Hopefully, in some measure, Stealing Rembrandts will smash that myth, helping law enforcement to better identify art thieves and fences, while also showing art collectors (including museums and galleries) who it is they must defend themselves against.

Until art is better protected, and the enemy more clearly understood, our cultural treasures will continue to fall victim to thieves with little regard for history, beauty, or the best achievements of their fellow man.

HANK: SO interesting, huh? Questions for Anthony? Or--what's your favorite painting? A signed copy of Stealing Rembrandts to one lucky commenter!

Anthony Amore is an art security expert and the co-author, with Tom Mashberg, of Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Stories of Notorious Art Heists, published by Palgrave MacMillan. He can be reached at anthonyamore@hotmail.com