Book cover image of The Portrait Of Molly Dean by Katherine Kovacic via Echo Publishing.
A true story informs The Portrait of Molly Dean: a tale of a portrait painted in the early 1930s which involves an unsolved murder (of a lovely young woman, predictably enough), male power and privilege, and a cover-up on the part of authorities.
For her first novel writer and art historian Katherine Kovocic has taken it upon herself to fill those gaps. The result clearly involved many delectable hours on her part researching the social and artistic life of Melbourne in the 20s and 30s. The past narrative is set in the world of bohemia; peopled with true characters from history, with the modern story taking place in the vicious arena of fine art dealership of the late 1990s.
A missing painting by a reasonably collectable artist, Colin Coulahan, has been unearthed in an op shop in a regional town and put up for auction, but only freelance art dealer Alex realizes its value, which is increased by the story attached to it. The portrait is of one Molly Dean, the artist’s lover, a woman in her mid-twenties who was battered to death and whose killer was never brought to justice. Frustratingly, we never learn where the painting has been since the artist fled Melbourne after Molly Dean’s death, nor who had kept it for so long, but the real story here is why Molly was killed and by whom.
Reluctant amateur sleuth Alex is your classic hardboiled, private character; she trusts only her dog, a wolfhound named Hogarth, and one friend, John Porter, an art conservator. The book is thus packed with intriguing details about cleaning and restoring paintings (we learn that human saliva is an excellent medium for removing grime from a painting because of the composition of its enzymes), and of the way art auctions are managed.
Giving your amateur detective protagonist good reasons to be secretive and subtle in her own life is a lot of fun for the observant reader. When Alex purchases the small portrait at auction, watching her stay one step ahead of a rival, a secret bidder determined to acquire the painting, nicely raises dramatic tension, then and later in the plot. The story is structured so that there are parallels between Alex’s life digging around in the past to discover what happened to Molly, and the cover-ups wannabe journalist Molly had been about to expose about an elusive business tycoon, Donald Raeburn. Kovocic lets you guess things and come to conclusions before Alex does. Here’s a writer who knows the conventions of the genre and how to engage readers on different levels.
The novel is written in a pedestrian, mostly unobtrusive prose style, fitting for the genre but which unfortunately sometimes thuds noisily. At one point the narrator takes her camera into the public records office ‘for if I want to photograph documents’ – it’s astounding how that clumsy and unnatural construction got through any of the editing processes. (She means, naturally, ‘in case I want to photograph documents’.)
And there’s another misstep on page 223 where the character of Daphne Lambell, referring to a potential murder suspect, says ‘they hung him the following year.’ An educated woman of the time, a ‘lady of breeding’, wouldn’t have said that; she would have been taught that ‘pictures are hung but people are hanged’. (Nobody understands this distinction these days. Refined sigh.)
But these are quibbles. This pacey mystery leaves a few too many questions frustratingly unanswered, but it kept me up reading all night until I finished it. It’s well-crafted and full of sensory detail animating the bohemian characters of Melbourne’s past; something we never seem to tire of.
★★★☆
The Portrait Of Molly Dean
By Katherine Kovacic
Published by Echo Publishing
March 2018
ISBN: 9781760409784
Format: Paperback
