After decades as an art historian, journalist, curator and director of a historic house museum, ten years ago I felt the urge to write murder mysteries. I was not, however, inspired to make them up out of whole cloth. For some unexamined reason, I choose to do away with real art-world characters who are, in fact, dead but who (with one exception) didn’t die when or where I kill them. All of them meet ends different from their actual deaths. 
 
Scholars aren’t supposed to make up stuff like that, so I don’t think my grad school advisor would have approved. Journalists are also expected to be factual, though as a New York Times art critic I had license to express my opinions, but not to be inaccurate. Museum directors and curators need to get their information right, too. Honest mistakes happen, but none of those lines of work tolerate outright liars.
 
So why would I go against the accepted ethical norms? Well, to be honest, just for the fun of breaking the rules and keeping my readers guessing. Locate the fictional crime in an authentic setting inhabited by people who were, or could have been, there at the time, have them interact with imaginary characters, and it’s hard to tell what’s true and what’s false. That’s how I’ve constructed all my Art of Murder mysteries, set in the creative community that migrates between New York City and the Hamptons on eastern Long Island, where my husband and I have lived for nearly fifty years. It’s such a rich source of potential victims and suspects that I’ll never run out of material.  And while the art world may seem opaque to outsiders, its machinations and motivations are entirely recognizable to the average reader.
 
As one of my fictional characters breaks it down, there are five universal motives for murder: jealousy, deception, rivalry, greed and revenge—words to live (or die) by in the world at large. Each of my novels takes a different slant on one of them, with predictably fatal consequences. In the first, An Exquisite Corpse, titled after a Surrealist parlor game, greed is at the forefront. Number two, An Accidental Corpse, hinges on jealousy. Revenge is the motive in the third, An Artful Corpse, while deception is at the heart of number four, An Elegant Corpse, and the latest, number five, A Willful Corpse. I’ll examine rivalry in mystery number six, published in April by Level Best Books. 
 
The Art of Murder series develops chronologically, decade by decade, starting in 1943, when a contingent of Surrealist artists and writers fled Hitler’s Europe and camped out in New York City during World War II. Those who know the true story have asked me why I decided to kill Wifredo Lam, one of the exiled Surrealists, who died in 1982 and who wasn’t even in the city during the war. The answer is, he was the perfect victim to lead the narrative in intriguing directions, and to rope in colorful characters who were his real-life associates. 
 
Two fictional NYPD officers, Brian Fitzgerald and Juanita Diaz—yes, there were female cops back then—who investigate the crime fall in love and marry, and their family story carries forward through the series. By 1956, they’re vacationing in East Hampton with their eight-year-old son, Timothy Juan, known as TJ. He helps solve the mystery of what looked like an accident but may have been the murder of Edith Metzger, a passenger in the car crash that killed the painter Jackson Pollock. (This is the only one of my novels in which the victim dies when and where, though not how, it really happened.) 
 
TJ takes the lead in the next book, set in 1967 New York City amid anti-Vietnam War protests and the heyday of Pop art, when the controversial artist Thomas Hart Benton—who died in 1975 and, like Lam, wasn’t in New York at the time—is stabbed to death at the art school TJ is attending. At age 19, TJ, who’s also studying at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is torn between a career in law enforcement and life as an artist. He resolves the conflict by giving up on art class, but not on his classmate, Ellen Jamieson. Fast forward to 1976, when TJ, now 28 and a licensed private eye married to Ellen, investigates the murder of his friend and mentor, the wealthy artist Alfonso Ossorio, who is found dead—14 years before his actual demise in 1990—in his East Hampton mansion. Ten years later, TJ is hired by Francis V. O’Connor, the leading expert on Jackson Pollock’s work, to track down an art forger, but winds up trying to find out whether O’Connor’s sudden death was an accident, suicide, or murder. Book number six will circle back to 1939, with Brian Fitzgerald as a rookie cop patrolling the soon-to-open New York World’s Fair, where muralists meet with mishaps—one fatal—that are definitely not accidental.
 
As a New York City native and longtime Hamptons resident who trained as an artist before studying art history, I’m intimately familiar with the milieux in which my mysteries are set. Many of the real characters were my friends or acquaintances, so I have an insider’s view of their personalities and behaviors. I knew Pollock’s long-suffering wife, Lee Krasner, and his lover, Ruth Kligman, as well as several of the artists in their circle. Ossorio and his life partner, Ted Dragon, were much as I describe them, and I was especially close to O’Connor. After reading An Exquisite Corpse, he told me I had a flair for mystery writing—high praise from a very judgmental critic. Sadly, A Willful Corpse, the book in which I kill him, was published in April, more than seven years after his death in 2017, so he will never know whodunit.
 
During her 34-year tenure as director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in East Hampton, New York, Helen Harrison began writing mystery novels set in the art world of which she’s a denizen. A widely published author of nonfiction books and articles on art, she enjoys making up stories in which fictional characters interact with people from her own background and experience as a New York Times art critic, NPR arts commentator, curator at the Parrish Art Museum, Guild Hall Museum and the Queens Museum, and a practicing artist. Her second novel, An Accidental Corpse, won the 2019 Benjamin Franklin Gold Award for Mystery & Suspense. A Mystery Writers of America active member, she and her husband, the artist Roy Nicholson, live in Sag Harbor, NY, with the ghost of Roy’s beloved studio cat, Mittens.

I started out writing literary short stories and that’s all I did for the first five or six years of my writing life and I was lucky enough to have many of them published.
 
Then, I entered a novella competition called The Great Novella Search. I won that and part of the prize was publication and the book was called Drifting, a kind of love story road novel and that was in 2017 and it’s still out there on Amazon and other digital stores.
 
After that, if I wrote a short story and it was published I’d ask myself if the idea was bigger and that’s how I wrote my first crime novel Going All the Way. It’s about a footballer who got kicked out of the big time after fucking up and now works as a Night Manager in a seedy three star motel in Kings Cross. A sex worker is killed in the motel while he’s on shift and he makes a decision to find the killer. And he never gives up no matter what.
 
I kept on writing short stories and published three collections all available through Next Chapter Publishers. I also wrote a crime trilogy that started with a book called City of Sin and includes City of Fear and City of Vice.
 
About this time I also started taking a lot of photographs and entered a few competitions and got shortlisted and commended and I found I loved doing it. I went to Vietnam and Hong Kong a few times and I swear to God my camera was out constantly. I like point and shoot photography. I don’t do much editing at all, maybe a little sometimes but just with the Apple photo app or the Google App, and that’s very rare.
 
There was a story in one of those short story collections called Tokyo Jazz and it was the starting point for my novel TRAFFIC, which is the first novel of mine due to be published by Level Best Books in March 25. The book features Bangkok-based, Australian PI Lee Jenson and there will be a three book series.
 
I’ve started writing another series that features a female PI, the first time a main character of mine has been a woman. I like the Andy Warhol quote, and I’m paraphrasing, where he says while other people decide if your art is good or bad just keep making art. For me, I’ll just keep writing and taking photos and let other people decide if it’s good or bad.
 
Thanks for the opportunity to blog here.


Sean O’Leary is a writer of crime and literary fiction from Melbourne, Australia. He has published five short story collections, four crime novels and two novellas as well as over fifty short stories in journals. He likes to walk everywhere, take photos like crazy, loves travel, writes like a demon, and thinks test cricket is the greatest game of all.