An artful turn by an old PI
ART can bring us joy, enlarge our perspective, even enlighten us. Sometimes, though, it can make us behave badly.
In Ace Atkins’ new novel, Old Black Magic, art makes people behave very badly indeed.
Three works of art, to be specific. A Picasso sketch, a sinister (is there any other kind?) Goya painting and, most magnificently, The Gentleman In Black, an intense portrait painted in 1597 by El Greco. All three were stolen 20 years ago in a daring invasion of the Winthrop Museum in Boston.
Now an investigator named Locke, who has been searching for the artworks all that time, is dying, and he wants to turn the quest over to a fellow professional he can trust to get the job done: Spenser.
The wisecracking, butt-kicking, gallant Spenser was created by the late great Robert B. Parker, who wrote 39 bestselling novels about the Boston private investigator. After Parker’s death in 2010, the author’s family and publisher chose Atkins to continue the series. Old Black Magic is Atkins’ seventh Spenser book. (Atkins, formerly a reporter at the Tampa Tribune and the then-St Petersburg Times, also writes a series about Mississippi sheriff Quinn Colton; the eighth novel, The Sinners, will be published in July.)
Atkins borrows some of the plot of Old Black Magic from the reallife 1990 heist of 13 works of art worth about half a billion dollars from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, a crime still unsolved.
At Locke’s behest (and the inducement of a US$5mil reward), Spenser goes to work for Marjorie Phillips, the Winthrop Museum’s formidable director. Spenser’s charms are pretty much lost on her, but she trusts Locke’s regard for his abilities enough to choose him over the museum board’s candidate, Paul Marston, whom she describes as a “candy-a** Brit who spends most of his days eating lunch on the pad of Sotheby’s and Christie’s”. (Spenser will like him even less.)
After reviewing the files on the theft, Spenser heads for one of his longtime sources, an expert maybe not on art but on crime. Vinnie Morris runs various criminal enterprises out of “an aging bowling alley in Cambridge”, Massachusetts, where he “seemed to relish the Rat Pack feel of the upstairs lounge, with the blond wood paneling and horseshoe-shaped bar”.
Vinnie points Spenser to accomplished art thief Devon Murphy. He couldn’t have done it because he was in prison at the time, Murphy tells Spenser, but it was his idea. He won’t name names, scorning the thieves for cutting the paintings out of their frames like “animals”, but he does suggest the detective talk to one of the guards on duty the night of the theft. “Ask him about the hookers. ... That part was all my idea. Sex works every freakin’ time.”
The search takes another turn when Marjorie gets a letter asking for ransom to recover the Picasso and perhaps the other works. Spenser will go along for the exchange and end up in jail himself.
But only briefly. His investigation will take him deep into two decades and more of organised crime in Boston, passing along the way through every Dunkin Donuts in the greater Boston area. (Spenser is mad about those corn muffins.) The pursuit of The Gentleman In Black takes some very unexpected twists, and even begins to suggest that the painting has mysterious powers.
Psychologist Susan Silverman, Spenser’s forever significant other, offers her usual insight, including coining a word to describe Spenser, Vinnie and others like them: mascopaths. “It’s my own term for serially overly macho psyches. Overly masculine personalities.”
Spenser’s parry: “Would you like me to perform one-armed push-ups before dessert?”
Speaking of mascopaths, Spenser’s even-tougher friend Hawk is, alas, for this book MIA in Brazil: “Probably up to his ears in warm bodies and cold caipirinhas.” But Vinnie will prove a capable stand-in when push comes to shove.
Old Black Magic has something of an elegiac air, from the dying man who sets Spenser’s search for the 500-year-old Gentleman in motion to the appearance of the detective’s beloved dog, Pearl: “A lot of new gray was forming around her eyes and muzzle. Given the gray at my temples, I wasn’t one to judge.”
In real life, Spenser himself would be more than a little gray. When Parker began writing about him in 1973, he was a Korean War veteran, which would put him in his 90s now.
His ageing has been slowed down since by the magic of fiction, and let’s hope that magic holds.
When Susan asks him, “At what point do you think your libido will catch up with your age?” Spenser’s response is, “I hope never.” – Tampa Bay Times/ Tribune News Service