On How Art Experts Make the Perfect Literary Detectives by Sarah Jost, Author of The Estate

Clearly, when creating his famous protagonist Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor of symbology who finds clues in famous artworks to uncover international conspiracies, immortalised on screen by Tom Hanks, Dan Brown was onto something. Experts and academics make outstanding literary detectives. After years of study, their knowledge of their field is narrow but deep, sometimes borderline obsessive – A. S. Byatt’s Possession’s Maud Bailey and Roland Mitchell become so entangled with the Victorian writers they are researching that their own personal lives start mirroring theirs. In fiction, expertise can easily tip into superhuman abilities (Langdon has an eidetic memory, ie the ability to recall an image perfectly after seeing it). Only those who have dedicated their lives to a specific field can spot when something isn’t quite right, and what is academic research if it isn’t digging and digging until you get as close as possible to the truth? Furthermore, if the experts happen to be flawed, morally grey, or a bit too desperate to prove themselves (like, for example, Ann Stillwell in The Cloisters), you have the perfect dramatic tension for a page-turner.

The protagonist of my new novel The Estate, Camille Leray, works in a London auction house as an expert in Fine Art. When she falls from grace and is invited to an ancient, atmospheric estate in Brittany to appraise re-discovered works by her favourite sculptor, she soon realises that she has stepped into a mystery that will require all her expertise and (supernatural) talents to solve.

I always wanted to write a novel involving art works. I studied History of Art as part of my Masters degree and, thanks to a particularly ruthless exam, one of my party tricks (though I’m getting a little rusty) is to be able to walk into a museum and date any artworks to within a decade or two of their making. This is done through a combination of knowledge and deduction – looking for the right clues contained within each piece. I also remember vividly the research project I had to present as a student in my first year: trying to make sense of an unnamed caricature which depicted the antique Laocoon sculpture as apes – extremely niche, but then it clicked and became really exciting: this was essentially detective work, a mystery I had to solve using sources and comparisons.

I was in Bruges in the summer of 2019 when Fake or Fortune came on the TV that was on in the background of our hotel room. In this BBC programme, journalist Fiona Bruce teams up with expert Philip Mould to investigate art works owned by viewers, which may or may not be by famous artists. This episode was centred on a potential ‘gazing head’ sculpture by Giacometti. Surrounded by the incredible art of Flanders, in that tiny Ibis room, I watched the investigation unfold, learning how tricky sculpture can be to authenticate, due to the possibility of ‘re-casting’, using the original moulds, that sets it apart from other forms of art. I also got a glimpse into how some forgers cleverly provide made-up sources to authenticate their pieces’ ‘provenance’ – in Giacometti’s case, a book was even written, detailing how Giacometti’s brother had allegedly kept a secret collection of his sculptures, to explain why they were now re-emerging on the market. It was utterly fascinating to find out how crime meddles with art and how hard experts have to fight to try and pry the truth from the fiction.

The monetary value of an authentic Giacometti added to the stakes (the sculpture was eventually sold at Christie’s for half a million pounds), but above all, I was struck by the range of techniques used to authenticate art. They are a complex mixture of meticulous research, scientific analysis and human expertise. While a scan can reveal what is hidden under the surface, or the pigments can be analysed to find out if they were available at the right time, experts do know ‘their’ artist so well that they can often tell whether the execution is right or not. And what if the expert’s ‘hunch’ was taken further, and they were able to go under the art’s surface in a supernatural way? The main character of The Estate can walk into the emotional landscape of an artwork, the memories and moments of inspiration for it – she is able to experience the artist’s input much more authentically… until she starts to doubt herself and her own power.

So, I knew from watching Fake or Fortune that I wanted to write about sculpture. When I remembered my teenage fascination for the French sculptor Camille Claudel, the plot of The Estate came together. Claudel’s doomed affair with Rodin and her tragic fate provided me with plenty of inspiration to create a mystery around the life of ‘my’ sculptor, and give my expert something to lose her own mind over. Add some rich and influential characters who all have their own agendas, raise the stakes and… voilà. The complex process of authenticating sculpture and Claudel’s tragic story provided me with plenty of opportunities to add suspense to the plot and keep the readers reading, and it didn’t even feel that far from reality.

Artworks are perfect to investigate because they only offer us a final product: the human experience and possible drama behind them needs to be re-constructed via investigation and clue-gathering. A bit like starting a novel with a murder, then trying to piece together what happened… A gothic-inspired art-based suspense novel, The Estate will invite you into the fascinating world of sculpture and the darker sides of the human psyche. And I think gifted, tenacious and obsessive Camille Leray is the perfect expert to take you with her on this journey.