Claudia Riess – Ladies of Mystery

The Love Imperative

by Claudia Riess

Love. What state of being—or deprivation of being—requires a more expansive lexicon? What adjective hasn’t been used to describe its properties or intentions? Transformative, destructive, blissful, shattering, blessed, accursed. Love is entangled, in one form or another, in the entire spectrum of human experience.

Besides being the most comprehensive of subjects, isn’t love, at least in its quintessential form, also the most compelling? Admit it, how many times have you read—or watched, in their numerous iterations—the stories of Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, An Affair to Remember? We know the endings, they’re etched in memory, but we’re drawn to reliving—or reviving—them, with the same imperative every time. As if through repetition, we can make the endings, or the ultimate fulfillment of love, or indeed, life itself, never end.

If my take on the subject of love is biased, maybe it’s because I’m an incurable romantic with no wish to be cured. I find it necessary, emotionally and tactically, for the element of romance to be a strong factor in my narratives. However, my focus on love, as both a predisposition and a means to enhance the plot, is not limited to the convolutions of romance. Deep friendship, family loyalty, devotion to a political or humanitarian cause are, among others, forces that drive the narrative forward.

To illustrate, I’ve excerpted a couple of passages from the books in my Art History Mystery series. The protagonists are Erika Shawn, an art magazine editor, and Harrison Wheatley, an art history professor. Book one, Stolen Light, brings them together to solve an academic mystery. The mystery turns deadly; their relationship, stormy. The series takes these initiates to the world of art-crime-solving through a number of multiple-murder, continent-hopping cases. At the same time, it follows their evolving relationship, from roller-coaster romance to passionate partnering to devoted parenting. Having an intimate story arcing alongside one with a more far-reaching effect, adds texture to the narrative as a whole—like musical instruments, which in concert highlight not only their own unique qualities, but in counterpoint, each other’s.

From Stolen Light… In a London hotel, Erika’s protective armor against falling in love begins to crack. This is the prologue to their romance, which changes not only the course of their relationship, but affects the mystery’s narrative:

She didn’t want to be alone though she never minded it, mostly enjoyed it, in fact. Except that in this moment being alone was uneasy solitude, and vaguely threatening. She wanted to snuggle into conversation, hear her voice mingle with another’s…Minutes later she was poised in front of Harrison’s door…

From False Light…By its very nature, Harrison’s playful and caring interaction with a little boy cannot but reflect his empathetic character. It will impact the way he approaches people and situations:

Erika wasn’t sure if Sammy had been heading straight for Harrison or if Harrison had stepped into his trajectory, but within seconds, he was scooping the boy off the floor, legs still pedaling…Sammy, taken by surprise, smiled. He stuck his clenched hand in front of Harrison’s face. Chicken pâté was oozing from between his fingers. “Yech!” he said, teasing a reaction out of Harrison…Erika stopped dead in her tracks as Harrison was opening his mouth to allow Sammy to jam it with a glob of pâté on crushed toast point. “Yummy,” Harrison crooned dreamily, sending Sammy into gales of laughter.

From Knight Light… On his own in Paris, Harrison’s faithfulness is tested by a beautiful colleague. For both Harrison and Erika, loyalty, real and perceived, will figure in the arc of their love story and their progress in the investigation at hand:

It was impossible to miss the twinkle in her eye toying with the bluntness of her invitation. He thought it best to go with the least circuitous response: “That’s kind of you, but I’m married.” Mugging confusion, Raquel looked about, as if for the stalking wife. “And?”

He shrugged. “There’s nothing to add.”

She smiled in disbelief. “How about life is short?”

“Exactly. There’s no time to lose, perfecting a relationship. Call me a pompous prude—”

“You’re a pompous prude.”

“—but that’s how it is.”

From To Kingdom Come… Erika and Harrison, are in London, for the first time away from their toddler, Lucas. They are in the throes of a complex murder mystery pivoting around the looting of African art during the colonial era. At this moment, they are attempting to escape a life-threatening situation, and the power of love is over-riding the primal force of self-preservation:

“Go!” John barked, grabbing Erika’s forearm as she reached out for Harrison with her free hand. “It’s okay, he’s right behind us!”

“Go!” Harrison echoed, wanting her to forget him, beat him to the gate. Clinging to him now would hamper her movement.

But she resisted John’s tugging and both their urgings—even Lucas, calling her from across the ocean, failed to change her mind—and there was nothing Harrison could do but grab onto her hand and slow her down.

From Dying for Monet… Harrison is temporarily confined to a wheelchair after suffering a traumatic injury in London. Erika is helping him handle the use of a commode; putting the inconvenience into broader perspective:

“We’re dealing with bodily functions. News flash. Everybody’s got them.” She’d adopted a tone somewhere between a dental hygienist and a nun.

“I appreciate your stoicism, but I find this humiliating,” he said.

“I love you,” she said, maintaining the firm demeanor. “This is another level of knowing. Think of it as a dry run for old age, when we will be helping each other manage such challenges as hip replacements and incontinence. Think of it as a new facet of devotedness.”

There’s a caveat to keep in mind when writing a mystery with a romantic component: in a bona fide mystery, the mystery should remain the driving force. I have a tendency to get swept into an emotional digression, and it’s only later, when reading through the section where the interlude occurs, that I realize the main thread’s been lost and I’ve got some pruning to do; even a major excision. For love, a small price to pay.

Dying for Monet, Book 5 in the art history mystery series

A gala evening auction at Laszlo’s, an upstart auction house in New York City, is in progress. Without notice, a much sought-after Impressionist painting is withdrawn from the block. Moments later, its broker is found dead at the foot of an imposing statue in Laszlo’s courtyard.

Amateur sleuths Erika and Harrison Wheatley are once again drawn into an investigation involving an art-related homicide, this time sharing an unnerving coincidence with violent crimes occurring abroad.

As Harrison searches for clues in the archives at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Erika is on a stakeout in Brooklyn Heights gathering information on the owner of the hijacked still life. After Harrison experiences a disastrous encounter in London, he returns home, where he and Erika, along with a few of their usual cohorts, find themselves ever more deeply at odds with the movers and shakers of the dark side of fine arts commerce.

For links to purchase books in the series, visit www.claudiariessbooks.com.

Claudia Riess has worked in the editorial departments of The New Yorker and Holt, Rinehart and Winston, and has edited several art history monographs. Stolen Light, the first book in her art history mystery series, was chosen by Vassar’s Latin American history professor for distribution to the college’s people-to-people trips to Cuba. To Kingdom Come, the fourth, will be added to the syllabus of a survey course on West and Central African Art at a prominent Midwestern university.

www.claudiariessbooks.com

Choosing to write an art history mystery series came relatively late in my career, but the seed was planted very early in childhood, and was as much a part of the natural course of events as learning to read and being read to—Winnie the Pooh, Mary Poppins, Alice in Wonderland—and being told laugh-out-loud stories, ad-libbed by my father, about a little girl named Jeanie, clearly my alias, and her adventures with her anonymous daddy, clearly my own. And like bedtime stories, my introduction to art—my association with art—was, and is, bound up with family, adventure, safe harbor.

It began with outings to museums. We lived in Brooklyn, and a couple of the great ones were a short subway ride away. The Metropolitan, the Museum of Modern Art, the Frick, the Brooklyn Museum. Typically, these outings were followed by take-out Chinese food and talks around the kitchen table about what we had seen that day. We talked about the different ways painters saw the world; debated about which perspective better described the real world—and what the real world really was. Color and light? Shape and dimension? And what about imagination? Created imagery. Distorted reality. Ideas about the relative nature of beauty and truth were woven into these conversations, and all the while we were savoring our chicken chow mein and fried rice with lobster sauce.

It stands to reason that my idea of the art world was a romanticized one, but by the time I’d written a few rom-com-like novels and murder mysteries and was considering writing an art suspense novel, I’d learned a lot more about its seamier side. How the price of art is virtually uncontrolled, dependent on the whims of collectors and dealers and the transient tastes and fads of the times. How art is ransomed, forged, used to launder money, stolen then sold on the black market. In short, that the art world is where the most sublime of human instincts collide with its basest. What a great amalgam for fiction!

I pitched the idea of my writing an art suspense novel to my brother, Jonathan, an art history professor at the University of Cincinnati, and he off-handedly suggested, “What about finding a lost study of Michelangelo’s Battle of Cascina?” As he enlarged on the subject, a conversation I’d had years ago popped into mind. It was my first week at Vassar College, and I was out of my social depth, trying to hold my own with one of my classmates, a seasoned debutant. I suppose the incident remained etched in memory because our life experiences were so disparate. Especially vivid was the story of how her father’s sugar plantation in Cuba had been confiscated by Fidel Castro’s government. It was this historical nugget that instantly dovetailed with my brother’s suggestion. In that moment, the American sugar plantation owner became an art collector, and as he and a freshly materialized plantation manager and a lovely cook’s assistant hid out in a basement storeroom, the art collection was being hauled off by a band of wannabe Castro rebels looking to raise money to buy arms.

The imagekicked off the prologue to Stolen Light, Book 1 of my art history mystery series. I’m a stickler for historical accuracy, and as a rule I take off from it, filling the gap with events that conform to its character, and therefore might have been. Then, in a butterfly-effect maneuver, I fast-forward to the present and drop a pair of resourceful lovers into the challenging set of circumstances that has developed—multiple murders included—and see if the sleuthing duo can sort it out.

For example, the impetus for Knight Light, Book 3 in the series, came from two quotes. From the painter Marcel Duchamp: “Not all artists are chess players, but all chess players are artists.” From World Chess Champion, Alexander Alekhine: “Chess for me is not a game, but an art.” From there, I discovered that the two had actually been team-mates on the French chess team in the 1933 Chess Olympiad. And that furthermore, Alekhine’s death in 1946 has been considered a cold case to this day. My fiction, integrated with the facts, took off from there.

Dying for Monet, Book 5 and the most recent in the series, is structured with the same criteria, except this time a crucial plot-twisting component hog-ties me to a bare-boned blurb. I’ve never felt more in danger of giving away the spoiler. I’m okay discussing Claude Monet and the Impressionists; Paul Ruand-Durell, the renowned art dealer based in Paris, carrying on in London during the Franco-Prussian War; the art museums in London; the disappearance of a still life painting; a brutal murder. Even the End Notes, where I mention books that were part of the research phase, omits a critical one whose title would blow it. Luckily, I’ve got my two sleuthing protagonists, Erika and Harrison, about whose ever-evolving love story I could go on forever.

Book 6, the last in the series, is in the works. Its plot is powered by the subject of artificial intelligence, boon and curse of the art world, depending on your definition of art or stake in its profits. My fascination was doubly sparked by an episode of CNN’s “The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper,” which focused on the Dead End Gallery in Amsterdam, the world’s first art gallery dealing solely in art generated by AI, and the Whitney Museum’s exhibition of Harold Cohen’s AARON, the world’s first AI program for art-making. These experiences raised questions regarding the genesis of inspiration, the act of creation, and the boundaries of ownership, all of which are potential harbingers of conflict, including the most deadly.

Dying for Monet

Amateur sleuths Erika Shawn, art magazine editor, and Harrison Wheatley, art history professor, are once again drawn into an investigation involving an art-related homicide, this time sharing an unnerving coincidence with violent crimes occurring abroad.

https://www.amazon.com/Dying-Monet-Art-History-Mystery/dp/1685126545

Claudia Riess is an award-winning author who has worked in the editorial departments of The New Yorker and Holt, Rinehart and Winston, and has edited several art history monographs. Stolen Light, the first book in her art history mystery series, was chosen by Vassar’s Latin American history professor for distribution to the college’s people-to-people trips to Cuba. To Kingdom Come, the fourth, will be added to the syllabus of a survey course on West and Central African Art at a prominent Midwestern university. Claudia has written articles for Mystery Readers Journal, Women’s National Book Association, the Sisters in Crime Bloodletter, and Mystery Scene magazine. She has been featured on a variety of podcasts, blogs and Zoom events.

claudiariessbooks.com.

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