An Artful Corpse

January 25, 2021
Set in 1967, Harrison’s timely final installment in her Corpse trilogy (after 2020’s An Accidental Murder) offers an inside look at New York’s Art Students’ League during the social and political upheavals of the period. Timothy Juan “TJ” Fitzgerald, the 19-year-old son of the married NYPD detectives from the previous book, enrolls in the Art Students League as he tries to decide between pursuing a career as an artist and following in his parents’ footsteps as a law enforcement officer. TJ, who’s also a sophomore at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, is quickly swept into the controversy that inevitably follows in the wake of the combative regional artist Thomas Hart Benton—a culture clash that pits intellectuals against populists. What begins as a war of words escalates to murder, and TJ sets out to prove the innocence of a fellow student who’s the prime suspect. The author’s convincing portrait of 1960s Bohemian life makes up for the somewhat perfunctory sleuthing. Readers will hope that Harrison, the director of the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, will soon be back with another mystery combining crime and art history.

January 1, 2021
The 1960s New York art world provides a backdrop for a crime of passion. The final entry in Harrison's Art of Murder trilogy begins on the evening of Nov. 1, 1967, when Christopher Gray, a student at the Art Students League of New York, arrives for class and discovers a dead body on the model stand. A flashback to late September shows a class led by Edward Laning. Student TJ Fitzgerald feels sparks with classmate Ellen Jamieson and fumes when class monitor Bill Millstein apparently has the same idea. After Ellen explains that Bill's gay, TJ, who's the son of the detectives from the first volume of Harrison's trilogy (An Exquisite Corpse, 2016), romances Ellen in earnest, and the trio become friends. The class is excited when Laning announces a visit from Thomas Hart Benton, but the artist turns out to be a bigoted boor, prone to insults and excessive drinking, and he ends up as the corpse discovered by Gray (unlike the real Benton, who died in 1975 in Kansas City). Jaded Inspector Jacob Kaminsky considers Bill, who got into a fight with Benton, the prime suspect. TJ and Ellen's relationship proceeds in tandem with Kaminsky's investigation, and they too do some sleuthing, bolstered by the criminal justice class they're taking at John Jay College. Entertaining set pieces include trips to legendary Greenwich Village nightclub The Bitter End, Max's Kansas City, and Andy Warhol's Factory, where somebody, probably Valerie Solanas, had threatened Benton. The solution comes out of left field; the mystery's really a MacGuffin for Harrison's affectionate portrait of a bygone era in New York. A brisk and breezy romp packed with celebs from a half-century ago.

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