I have a really hard time killing anyone.
Mysteries need a certain framework: there’s a killing. Dead people don’t tell tales (though as many forensic mysteries have taught us, their bodies do!) There’s a sleuth. If it’s a police procedural, we learn how a brilliant homicide detective solves the killing, against the interests of his department superior. If it’s a “retired, damaged cop/investigator/PI” we watch as the sleuth overcomes his or her personal demons to uncover Truth. And when it’s an amateur sleuth, we follow her through the unwilling stage, the compelling part, and the final-danger-discovery, to bring the malefactor to justice in time to feed her cat.
But every one of those stories needs a body.
What’s a deeply empathetic mystery writer to do?
Enter the Art Heist. Art Heist mysteries are a hoot to write, and a pleasure to read.
A heist mystery may have a body somewhere, but it’s the theft of the precious art object that starts the ball rolling. Something valuable, possibly well-known, certainly well-guarded, emphatically precious, is going to disappear. Sometimes, the plot allows us to side with the thief: maybe the object was originally theirs, or their people’s, and was taken unfairly or with malice. If the thief or thieves are charismatic enough, if the plan to steal the art is complex enough, and the current owner is on the wrong side of virtue, we root for the success of the heist. Think Oceans 11.
If the thief is a villain, though, then thwarting the theft, at great personal risk, or recovering the object after the theft, also with great personal danger, becomes the engine of the story. Justice still has to prevail and a real villain must be brought to justice.
All three of the Zara and Lilly adventures are heist mysteries. In Nine Tenths of the Law, Zara and Lilly chase a menorah, stolen from their mother in 1939 by the Nazis, through modern-day New York City. It had been shown at a museum, and before they could make a claim, it had disappeared. Zara and Lilly learned more about their mother’s past, and their own relationship, than they could ever have dreamed of in that chase. In Our Lying Kin, a vengeful thief seeks the recovery of the Archives of Degenerate Art, journals belonging to the Reich.
In the newest Zara and Lilly adventure, Sisters at an Exhibition, a Caravaggio sketch is declared a fraud.
Before the curator who authenticated it can defend her findings, the Caravaggio, and the curator, disappear. Zara and Lilly find themselves drawn into the chase, which takes them from San Francisco to New York City, and then to Alsace, France, where another story lies buried deep below a farmhouse that was burned to the ground during the War.
Is there humor? Well, Lilly never met a man—or a scam—that she didn’t at least wink at! And cynical, methodical Zara’s sarcastic tongue may get them in more trouble than they can handle. (Just wait until you read about the change in Zara’s hairstyle…) But interlaced with the humor, the heist and the hair, there is a twisted tale of a journal kept by the “children of the forest” (children, mostly boys, who hid in the forests to try to survive during World War II), the realities of rebuilding a life torn apart by loss, and the love that binds the sisters, no matter what their differences.
Maybe with so much loss, there’s no need to have a murder. Certainly, there can be a mystery, and amateur sleuths, and a complex plot full of danger, without adding to the toll of bodies in literature.
There’s even a cat.
Come for the art heist, stay for the family stories!
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