“The challenge is to write about real things magically.” — Raymond Chandler
It all begins simply enough. There is a stranger, then a break-in. There is a crime, a body, a mystery to be solved. So begins Memphis author Susan Bacon’s second novel, The Art Collector.
When Professor Emma Quinn’s friend and neighbor, Seal Larson, a photographer with Memphis roots, is murdered, Emma finds herself enmeshed in a web of deceit, money, art, and Southern history. Bacon deftly maneuvers the reader through present-day chapters and those set in the past, juggling locations and characters, and crafting a compelling page-turner in the process.
Tinker, Tailor, Copywriter, Novelist
Susan Bacon
Bacon began her writing career far from fiction. (“Bacon” is a pen name for Susan Dynerman. We will use “Bacon” for the purpose of this review.) She worked as a journalist (including for this magazine), an award-winning copywriter, a writer of nonfiction works, and a ghostwriter. Her career has taken her from Delaware to Memphis to New York to Washington, D.C., and back to the Bluff City. A few years ago, she wrote her first novel The History Teacher (Porter Street Press, 2019). In 2020, Bacon received an Independent Book Publisher (IPPY) Award for The History Teacher.
“I came from the Northeast. The South, to me, was full of surprises,” Bacon says. There was a romance to the region, though, and she couldn’t help but feel the call of storytelling. Her second novel contains a number of scenes in Memphis and in Plantersville, Mississippi. The descriptions evoke a sense of discovery and fascination that reads not unlike someone experiencing a setting for the first time.
“This is all like putting together a puzzle,” Bacon says of her process. “It’s fed by the research and also the things I’ve done and known about in the past. And then also, because this is a sequel to the first novel, that influences it as well. … Then there are all these little pieces from stories that I wrote years ago when I first moved to Memphis.”
Bacon’s travels are put to good use in the novel, as Emma hops from city to city, or in chapters narrated by Seal, which take place in the past. The author imbues the work with a sense of place; the reader will feel equally grounded in a sprawling Southern farm, a Manhattan apartment, or The Peabody in downtown Memphis.
“The Memphis pieces were significant to me,” Bacon tells me over the phone, but the admission is hardly necessary. The Memphis chapters are alive with the sounds and smells of the region.
The Price of Success
No spoilers here,” I wrote of The History Teacher for the Memphis Flyer some few years ago, “but this is no tea-cozy mystery devoid of real consequences and implications. The novel examines the cost of privilege and wealth — and the interconnected worlds of politics, business, and high society. It’s well worth a read.”
The same is equally true, if not more so, for The Art Collector. Bacon’s work examines the dirty underbelly of seemingly cultured and respectable institutions, with a special focus on the depredation of the vulnerable by the wealthy and well-connected. In this sense, there is an air of social criticism to Bacon’s work, and rightly so. The hardboiled genre has always had its roots firmly planted in the examination of societal ills.
The novel struggles with the proximity — and, sometimes, interdependence — of great beauty and devastating horrors. It’s a worthy struggle, and it takes courage to look clearly at the ugly underside of a beautiful world.
“I’m calling it a mystery,” the author says of her newest book. “I use the mystery as a framework or a hook to talk about the things I want to talk about.” Indeed, Bacon clearly feels compelled to ask certain questions: What is the cost of wealth? Who pays the price?
Even the choice of protagonist is a political one, if viewed from the proper perspective. Bacon’s private eye is, in fact, not private at all. Rather, Emma Quinn is a professor and researcher; she teaches history at Columbia University. She is competent and capable, and she neatly sidesteps many of the foibles of her fictional contemporaries. Emma is not nearly as hard-living as Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade, and that affords her a level of credibility and morality that those senior sleuths somehow seem to get by without.
“Emma was mesmerized by the twinkling lights along the alleyway. They were like fireflies off in the distance, or the sticks of punk that kids used to wave in circles on the Fourth of July, burning like the tips of lit cigarettes,” Bacon writes. The ethereal lights quickly lose their luster when Seal hisses at Emma that the lights are the burning ends of crack pipes. “Not so pretty when you know what they are,” Seal tells Emma, and that sentence says so much about the soul of The Art Collector.
The novel struggles with the proximity — and, sometimes, interdependence — of great beauty and devastating horrors. It’s a worthy struggle, and it takes courage to look clearly at the ugly underside of a beautiful world.
Writing with Passion About Interests
Vladimir Nabokov was a noted lepidopterist, or butterfly collector, and butterfly imagery shows up in his work. James Joyce’s encyclopedic knowledge of Dublin so informed his works that the Irish expatriate author never stopped writing about the city, long after he left it. Patricia Highsmith kept snails, and it will surprise no one who has found themselves tongue-tied by the Elvish names in The Lord of the Rings to learn that J.R.R. Tolkien possessed a mania for the invention of languages.
Writers are, perhaps more than most people, subject to deeply felt, intense interests. Susan Dynerman’s (a.k.a. Bacon’s) Are Our Kids All Right? Answers to the Tough Questions About Childcare Today is an early example of the author’s interests influencing her written works. She was an advocate for enlightened family leave and child-care policies, and contributed stories to The Washington Post to that effect. So it should be no surprise that her interest in art was fed by research for The Art Collector.
That passion for art had been percolating for some time before she began work on her newest novel. She was drawn deeper into the world of fine art when she interviewed Carroll Cloar years ago for a magazine feature, and her art appreciation has only grown since then.
“I have artist friends and I’ve been collecting from people my whole life,” Bacon says. She stresses that the fame of the artist or financial value of the pieces in her collection is not the driving factor for her as a collector. Instead, she simply enjoys the art of expression.
Her background in history and journalism has prepared her well for the massive amount of research that can go into writing a novel. So, fueled by a love of art and armed with the grit to get the work done, Bacon interviewed Memphis collectors, gallery owners, and artists who worked in the scene at the time. She read Michael Shnayerson’s Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art, about the history and inner dealings of the contemporary art market.
“This was a vehicle for me to explore [art] more and learn more about artists I hadn’t heard about before,” Bacon says with a laugh. “That’s the fun of it. If I’m not going to learn something, what’s the point?”
Susan Bacon will discuss The Art Collector at Novel bookstore on Sunday, September 15, at 2 p.m.
