Tim Maleeny and the ART of writing a mystery...

 HALLIE EPHRON: Today I am thrilled to host Tim Maleeny. The tag line for his latest Cape Weathers mystery, HANGING THE DEVIL, irresistible: 

It was supposed to be a simple job: steal the paintings, leave the forgeries.

Tim's mystery novels are always intricate, fascinating, and alternately heartpounding and funny. This new entry in the series is somethig more - it's deeply steeped in art.

Welcome, Tim!

TIM MALEENY: Hallie, big thanks to you and all the Reds for letting me join for the day!

Before I start talking about writing, research, and art, I have to mention that I’ve been trying to declutter lately—not my strong suit—and at my wife’s insistence finally tackled the daunting task of emptying an old storage unit.

As you’d imagine, Careful What You Wish For keeps popping into my head, that’s such a terrific book! Fortunately none of the dark corners of our storage unit or the bins bulging with books and papers have revealed any dark secrets or put me in peril...yet.

HALLIE: This is starting to sound all too famliar...

TIM: However, one thing I did discover is a stack of posters and prints that once decorated an old apartment of mine, which brings me to the topics of today’s post: research and art history. These are subjects in which I had a rough working knowledge when I began writing my latest novel, Hanging The Devil, but my research revealed I had so much more to learn.

The book opens with a daring heist at The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco that goes horribly wrong when a helicopter crashes through the skylight, a robbery ending in tragedy that sets off a series of events connected to a global ring of smugglers, master forgers, and organized crime.

The story is loosely based on actual crimes, so I had to get my facts straight, which meant visiting museums, studying catalogues, and learning how to paint a convincing forgery.

I don’t know about you, but I tend to get lost in the research for my novels, maybe because writers love learning, or perhaps because the one thing I’ve truly mastered is procrastination. Either way, this story needed characters who came across as credible experts, which meant I had to travel down the rabbit hole as far as I could go.

What I discovered over the course of my research is that the stories behind the art were, by far, the most fascinating part of the puzzle.

Most of the paintings and sculptures I admired when I was younger were captivating for the skill of the artist, and while that’s still the case, my investigations led to a genuine fascination with how art gets made.

Researching the materials used to make paints in prior centuries—something any good forger must know—demonstrates how incredibly important art is to the human psyche. Whether writing, painting, sculpting or composing, telling a story in words, pictures, marble or song isn’t easy, and it used to be much, much harder than it is today.

When it comes to painting, certain pigments weren’t readily available, which limits your color palette. Imagine being asked to write a novel but only with certain letters or words? The chemistry behind the materials used to perfect paints that would hold over time was practically alchemy, trial and error involving everything from tree sap, dead insects, pulverized gems, and animal urine. (Yes, you read that last one correctly; it’s better not to ask.)

Not to mention the lack of indoor plumbing or electric lighting a modern artist’s studio might be expected to provide. It’s hard enough to paint in full daylight, let alone by candlelight with no central heating while your subject is scratching the head lice away.

When you hear the stories behind the art—the themes represented and the politics of the day—you start to appreciate why these efforts at self-expression served a great purpose, an outlet for people to find their voice and society to see itself from a fresh perspective. And then, when you learn what it took to physically make the masterpieces we’ve all seen and admired, it gives a new appreciation for why art matters, and why our own visceral response to a story, painting, or any work of art, is an emotional echo of something much bigger than ourselves.

As for mixing my own paints and becoming a master forger, I’ve decided to stick with writing. The tree sap is impossible to wash off, the dead insects are gross, and the rest of it...well, I prefer to play with words.

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TIM MALEENY is the multiple award-winning author of the Cape Weathers mysteries and the bestselling comedic thriller JUMP. His latest caper is Hanging The Devil, named the Mystery Pick of the Month by Library Journal in a starred review for its “relentlessly fast-paced plot and dry humor.” A former resident of San Francisco, Tim currently lives and writes in New York City.

HALLIE: And lucky for us that Tim has decided to stick with writing. What we do for our "art"! I want to know how he knows what handling dead insects is like... Tim will be dropping by today so if you want to know more about art forgery, fire away!

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.