Karen Odden On the Cutthroat World of Art and Murder

RHYS BOWEN:  It's always a pleasure to host my friend, fellow Arizonan and fellow historical mystery writer, Karen Odden. And when we can't travel, she can transport us to Park City or to Victorian England. So welcome, Karen.

KAREN ODDEN: Like my friend Rhys, my family and I try to spend some time out of the Arizona heat each summer. In Park City, Utah, the mountains are a lovely change, and over the years I’ve found that I write differently up here. I hike most days, and as best I can explain, the act of shifting my gaze constantly between the expansive mountain vistas and the tiny wildflowers opens up what feels like a play-space in my brain, with room for weird plot twists and eccentric characters

 It’s no place for my squint-eyed internal editor, however, so I set down words more rapidly on the page. Two years ago this summer, I drafted my third novel, A Trace of Deceit, which came out last December, and I still remember my artist heroine Annabel Rowe, her troubled brother Edwin, and their world in 1870s London coming alive for me on Spiro Trail.

The foundation of the novel was laid earlier, though, with my work at Christie’s auction house back in the scandal-filled 1990s. (For those who don’t recall, Sotheby’s and Christie’s were caught price-fixing, and the heads of Sotheby’s paid millions of dollars in fines and stepped down in disgrace, while Christie’s employee Christopher Davidge skated away in exchange for his testimony.) Having never taken an art history class, I didn’t know a Miro from a Modigliani when I arrived. But I knew marketing, so I’d been hired to buy ad space in publications such as the New York Times, Magazine Antiques, Art & Auction, and the Maine Antiques Digest, where we promoted our auctions for everything from Van Gogh paintings to Fabergé eggs and Paul Revere silver spoons

[Illustration of Portrait of Dr. Gachet by Van Gogh]. In order not to appear a complete idiot about art, I perused these publications and many others. (This, despite the fact that when I was a child, my father insisted I’d never find a job that paid me to sit around and read!)

Through reading, I learned to appreciate art objects, but what captivated me were the stories around them—the daring heists, the deceptive forgeries, the vicious family feuds, the anonymous sales by European nobility who sought to mend their fortunes discreetly, the desperate attempts to preserve art during WWII, the lawless pillaging of antiquities from Egypt, and so on. On my 29^th birthday, in 1994, I was in “the room where it happens”—Christie’s main salon—when Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Hammer, the notebook with the famous Vitruvian man

, was auctioned off in a fierce, frantic bidding war for $28 million to an anonymous phone bidder, who turned out to be Bill Gates. It was the first time I felt down to my bones, and in the adrenaline running down my arms, the suspense, allure, and history that surround pieces of art.  

            For my third novel, I wanted to explore the cutthroat 1870s London art world, with an artist heroine, but did such a woman really exist? In graduate school, at NYU, studying the Victorian era and its literature, I learned just how difficult it was for nineteenth-century middle-class women to exert agency, to authorize their lives, to carve their own paths as professionals in any fields other than the genteel ones of teaching and governessing. No amount of “feistiness” could overcome the very real economic, social, educational, and political limitations women faced, including the system of coverture, which meant that married women could not keep their wages, own or inherit property, or initiate any legal proceeding, including divorce.

As I began to research, however, I came upon a few encouraging stories of women artists who made their living by their craft. One was Kate Greenaway (1846-1901), for whom the annual and prestigious Greenaway Medal for British book illustration is named. Another was Evelyn De Morgan (1855-1919; born Mary Evelyn Pickering), whose stunning paintings I had seen in the Met in New York. As a child, Mary was immensely talented in both writing and painting—but her upper-class mother “wanted a daughter, not a painter,” and paid Mary’s art tutor to demean her efforts and discourage her. Like the story of Charles Dickens’s older sister Fanny, a brilliant pianist who had to leave the Royal Academy of Music because she couldn’t afford tuition (which hardship fueled my second novel, A Dangerous Duet), this anecdote spoke to me of all the painful consequences of the constraints on ambitious, talented women in the 1800s.

Fortunately, in 1871, the forward-thinking philanthropist Felix Slade funded a school of art at the University College London (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/about) in Gower Street. He made it a condition of his donation that men and women would enter on equal footing for serious art study, including women being permitted to take classes in anatomical drawing (with the heretofore forbidden nudes—gasp). Both Greenaway and Pickering eventually found their way to the Slade, and De Morgan won one of the prestigious scholarships, going on to paint brilliant, bold figures well into the twentieth century.

 De Morgan’s story raised all sorts of questions for me. What does it mean to be discouraged from your ambitions by your mother, by a mentor, and by society? How does it narrow your horizon, shut down your heart, fade your sense of bright possibilities? And is there a flip side of this coin, for men?

n A Trace of Deceit, Annabel is a student at the Slade in 1875. Her older brother Edwin was ostensibly the “gifted” child of the family, but pressured by his ambitious father to develop his genius, Edwin grew sulky and resentful, eventually turning to a life of opium, crime, and lies. A convicted forger, Edwin has just been released from prison as the novel begins, and as he seeks to mend his ruptured relationship with Annabel, he swears to her that he has reformed and will pursue his craft within the law. When he is murdered, and a priceless French painting by François Boucher disappears (in chapter 1), Annabel is desperate to discover the truth about Edwin’s death. Had Edwin lied to her? Or had he genuinely changed his ways? As she and Inspector Hallam of the Yard follow the clues that lead to Edwin’s past, she realizes her memories of Edwin are not like a painting, fixed in form and tone; they all bear a trace of deceit.  

This summer, I am drafting another mystery, again set in 1870s London. Henry Morton Stanley (of “Dr. Livingston, I presume” fame) has just returned from his first expedition to Africa, which he would later describe  My heroine Gwendolyn Manning has a friend Lewis Ainsley, a (fictional) journalist, who returns with Stanley and plans to write a book exposing the brutality of the ivory and slave trades. But there are influential men who would squelch that story, and when Lewis is murdered, Gwendolyn must find out why—especially after Lewis’s wife points the police toward her. The words are landing on the page, messily, but they’re landing, and this afternoon I’m off to hike and find some more.

Short bio:

Karen Odden earned her PhD in English at New York University, writing her dissertation on Victorian medical, legal and popular literature. She has taught at the UW-Milwaukee and served as an assistant editor for the academic journal Victorian Literature and Culture. Her first novel, A Lady in the Smoke, was a USA Today bestseller; A Dangerous Duet won Best Historical Fiction at the New Mexico-Arizona book awards. She lives in Arizona with her family and her sixteen-year-old beagle-muse Rosy.