It’s been almost a year since I last worked on a novel. That’s quite a long time for me. For most of the past eight years, I’ve always had a novel in the works.
Since finishing the manuscript for Calamity Lake in December 2021, I’ve waited to hear back from agents. In the meantime I didn’t want to begin a new project. It’s not that I don’t feel committed to Rock Hudson as a protagonist. It’s more a sense that he offered limited possibilities for a series. How many crimes can a consulting geologist solve?
I wrote a couple of stories, spend time revising a few old ones that lay dormant on my cloud. Between those editing ventures, I read reports and analyses released by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
Readers of the Valentin Vermeulen novels know that money laundering has long been an interest of mine. Combine money laundering with tax evasion and you end up with a gurgling cauldron of malfeasance that spans the globe. One of the bubbles that popped in front of my eyes was the global trade in fine art and antiquities.
With some regularity, we read headlines that this or that painting fetched an astonishing price at an auction in London or New York. My usual reaction to such news is, “Meh.” That is, until I found out that the international art market is a haven for shady operators and crooks. In 2020 alone that trade amounted to some $50 billion.
A February 2022 US Treasury Department report, spells out that the increasing use of off-shore Limited Liability Companies and shell companies has made the historically opaque art trade ripe for illegal transactions. Bribes to government officials in Nigeria and Malaysia were channeled through off-shore companies to purchase expensive paintings, which were then “gifted” to the recipients.
Similarly, proceeds from criminal activities are invested in fine art both to temporarily store hot cash and as an investment, seeking appreciation in value of the art. Add to that the rise of art storage facilities in Free-Trade-Zones (FTZs) that exist outside the jurisdiction of governments, and illegal fine art investments are beyond the reach of national tax and crime authorities.
Being up to speed on this form of criminal activity is one thing, turning it into a novel is quite another. The hardest part of turning an idea and into a novel is taking an abstract sense of wrongdoing and making it come to live in a concrete story with flesh and blood characters.
Who is the villain? What’s their plan? Who’s the protagonist? How do they stumble onto the secret the villain is trying to hide? Where is all this going to take place?
It took my a while to find my characters and I’m still not quite there. But a few chapters in, I’m confident that I have a start and it’s exciting to begin the journey of writing a novel again.
Further updates as warranted.
