Iain Pears, The Raphael Affair

 Iain Pears, The Raphael Affair
Copyright © 1990 Iain Pears
Berkeley Prime Crime/Penguin-Putnam
     (paperback reprint)
ISBN:  0-425-16613-9

Iain Pears wrote one of the most convoluted, engrossing, maddening (and several other adjectives) I have ever read—An Instance of the Fingerpost.  I don’t even want to try to explain the title (which may be the easiest part of the book, actually).  It has 4 (first-person) narrators, all of them unreliable.  Here, however, we have a fairly straightforward third-person narrative which deals with the rather convoluted (and, in his series of mysteries, nefarious) world of fine art.  There are three main characters:  General Taddeo Bottando, head of the police organization devoted to dealing with art world frauds (and other crimes); Flavia di Stefano, one of his associated; and Jonathan Argyll, an art historian in the process of finishing his dissertation,.  I enjoy all three of t hem; they are delights.  (This is the first of 7 mysteries in which they appear, published between 1991 and 2000. All of the books are, unsurprisingly, art history mysteries, involving the work of other transcendent painters from the15th and 16^th centuries.)

The story begins with the discovery of what might be a previously unknown painting by Raphael (Raphael - Wikipedia; 1482-1520; images of his paintings: raphael - Google Search), of a “portrait of Elisabetta da Laguna, about 1505.  Oil on canvas, sixty-eight centimeters by one-hundred and thirty eight.”  It is sold at auction for 63 million pounds (roughly $150 million at the time).  The painting had been over-painted—assuming it’s an authentic Rafael—centuries before.  The buyer is a state museum in Rome.  And, at a reception attended by the rich and famous, art dealers, and assorted others—the painting, about to be unveiled for the first time since the auction, is apparently destroyed (or was it destroyed? in an apparently accidental fire caused by an electrical fuse shorting out (or was it accidental?) 

The story unfolds at a fairly leisurely pace (for a 200 page book), which fine.  We get to know the main characters and we get to spend a lot of time in Roam (and, eventually, Sienna).  Of course, nothing happens easily, and one of the conservators at the museum is murdered.  The suspects in all of this range from the owner of a successful art auction house in London to members of the museum staff, and involve present and past art forgers and thieves.  The resolution occurs in Siena, one of the beautiful hill towns in Tuscany (where there is an annual horse race in the main square of the city—which does not figure in the story, but which is worth mentioning [Palio di Siena - Wikipedia]). 

I thought I had read all the books in this series, but upon reading (not, as it turns out, re-reading it), I found the entire thing new.  The three main characters are delightful, and I’m looking forward to the others.  If there’s a weakness, it comes in the denouement, when General Bottando explains to everyone what has happened (including generous acknowledgement of the efforts of Flavia and Jonathan).  The problem is that we neither saw nor heard of Bottando’s part of the investigation, so it’s not really a fair-play mystery.  It’s still a very good book, well set and well told, with characters well worth revisiting.