”The villa on the Riviera had been an anonymous gift to the artist, and he had accepted it in the spirit in which it was offered. No strings attached.”The villa on the Riviera had been an anonymous gift to the artist, and he had accepted it in the spirit in which it was offered. No strings attached. He wasn’t well-to-do, but the sale of his Montmartre shop would take care of his expenses for several months. The Paris Soir reporter then asked the obvious question. ‘If you refuse to exhibit or to sell your paintings, how will you live?
‘That,’ Debierue replied, ‘isn’t my concern. An artist has too much work to do to worry about such matters.’ With his mistress clinging to his arm, Debierue climbed into a waiting taxi and was off to the railroad station.”
Jacques Debierue is, without a doubt, the most famous painter in the world who has never sold a painting. No one has seen even a scrap of one of his paintings for decades, and yet the endless speculation about what he is creating has kept the art world atwitter. When James Figueras, ambitious art critic, gets a chance to meet him, he is not only determined to take his picture and get an interview, but to also, at all cost, lay eyes on the man’s work.
James decides to take his “girlfriend” with him, a teacher from Duluth who climbed into his bed while on vacation in Florida and...won’t leave. ”Despite her size, and she was a large woman, Berenice, curled and cramped up in sleep, looked vulnerable to the point of fragility. Her unreasonably long blond lashes swept round flushed cheeks, and her childish face, in repose and without makeup, took several years from her age. Her heavy breasts and big round ass, however, exposed now, as the short flimsy nightgown road high above her hips, were incongruously mature in contrast with her innocent face and tangled Alice-in-Wonderland hair.”
Berenice, for all her annoying aspects, is the artist’s bait. Debierue might be less likely to boot the art critic down the road if the art critic brings something lovely for the artist to admire. James is a serious man, and even though he tries to control every aspect of this historic meeting between a famous painter without a known painting to talk about and the desperate-to-be famous art critic, things get seriously out of hand.
There is a revelation.
There is a fire.
There is an art critic, sitting in a hotel room, painting a picture called The Burnt Orange Heresy.
There is an unexpected murder.
Everything that could possibly go wrong in a James Figueras nightmare does so, including things that he couldn’t even conceive of going wrong in his wildest, most sinister dreams.
In other words, this is a Charles Willeford novel.
I first read Willeford’s novels thirty years ago, but I think I actually have a much greater appreciation reading and rereading his books now than I did then. He’ll make your teeth squeak as you grind your molars together to masticate the hardboiled egg of a plot he has dropped on your plate. And what you are spitting out? That ain’t eggshell; that’s grit, road grit. And that pain in your neck is from the hard left turn plot twists that left you half hanging out of the car and two wheels dangling in the air. And that red sauce on your tie? That ain’t sauce...you just got a little too close to the action.
Loading...
