The Caravaggio Shawl by Samuel M. Steward, subtitled “A Gertrude Stein–Alice B. Toklas mystery”.

This novel, from 1989, follows Murder is Murder is Murder by four years. In the back pages of that book, Murder is Murder is Murder is named as the first of the series, but there seem to be only that one and this. Samuel Steward would die in 1993 at age 84.

The setting is Paris in April of the year 1937. Murder is Murder is Murder is set later that summer and into the spring of 1938. But the chronology is confused. In this novel there’s a reference to an incident in the earlier novel, which will only happen later. Here, Gertrude and Alice are already living at the Rue de Christine apartment rather than the more famous address on rue de Fleurus, but they won’t actually move until that winter. There’s a more serious chronological error, too, in that in one scene Gertrude and Alice view the Jean Genet movie, Un Chant d’Amour, a film that Genet didn’t make until 1950. Gertrude had already been dead four years when it came out. There’s a similar problem in Steward’s Parisian Lives where the characters in 1939 refer to a Genet novel, Our Lady of the Flowers, that wasn’t written until 1943. Perhaps Steward was relying on memory and didn’t bother to look up the dates. Of course, it’s fiction, so it doesn’t really matter.

The mystery, as in Murder is Murder is Murder, is very slight, and Gertrude and Alice do very little actually sleuthing. Once again, they are aided by their young gay friend, Johnny McAndrews, a stand in for Samuel Steward. Samuel Steward did actually know Gertrude and Alice and visited them frequently in the 1930s. He was working then as an English Professor at a university in Chicago but spending his summers in Paris and had been introduced to the famous author when he was still in graduate school by a professor who admired Gertrude Stein. The portrait Steward provides of his friends is genial, but the ladies come off not impressive but silly. And his self-portrait, in the character of Johnny McAndews, draws him as sex-obsessed, which Samuel Steward probably was. Johnny says, “Sex always gets in the way for me” (p. 166).

The story begins with the ladies invited to preview a Caravaggio painting of Orpheus recently discovered and given to the Louvre. Gertrude admires a red color in the painting and Alice decides to knit a scarf for her in that color. When Alice returns to the Louvre the next day with some yarn samples to match the color, she discovers that the original painting they viewed the day before has been stolen and replaced by a forgery. In reporting her discovery to the museum administrator she discovers the dead body of a museum guard, who just happens to be the husband of Gertrude and Alice’s maid. Before the police arrive she also recovers a small lapel pin, which she assumes was lost by the murderer.

The next day, Gertrude and Alice host a salon at her house and tell the story to their guests. Johnny McAndrews notices that one of the guests, a painter named Vain Benitier, has a visibly uncomfortable reaction when they talk about the forged painting. The mystery is practically solved, for the reader, in the very next chapter, when there’s a scene of the painter and his lover, a cop named Rencule, and Rencule, getting dressed, notices that he’s missing his lapel pin. Gertrude and Alice soon learn from the newspaper that the police have a suspect named Gaire whose fingerprints were found on the forged painting.

Johnny knows the cop, Rencule, too. They had their own sex scene in an earlier chapter at the base of the Arc de Triomphe, of all places. Johnny and the painter Benitier also have sex. And later Johnny meets and beds yet another cop, Eduardo Quisse. Gertrude and Alice learn from an American friend of theirs that a man named Rideau has the Caravaggio Orpheus in his home. She discovered it accidentally when she had attended a screening there of the Genet film. Gertrude and Alice confront Benitier and he confesses to the forgery. He did the painting on commission for Rideau in exchange for Rideau using his influence to get some of Benitier’s original paintings included in an art exhibition.

The final scene takes place at the Arc de Triomphe. Gertrude and Alice receive an anonymous letter inviting them to the museum inside the monument. There they are surprised by Rencule. He asks for the return of his lapel pin, the only evidence tying him to the murder, apparently. But he confesses to the whole episode: he and Gaire stole the painting for Rideau, replacing it with Benitier’s forgery. Rencule killed the guard when he got in the way. Rencule threatens to shoot Gertrude and Alice but Alice has brought a derringer with her, which she uses to shoot Rencule in his hand, and then Johnny with the other cop, Eduardo rush in. In the final chapter, as Gertrude and Alice drive to their summer home in Bilignin, we learn that Rencule has committed suicide in jail. Benitier has been sentenced to six months but the notoriety of the episode and his skill with the forged painting has been a boon to his art career. And Rideau, the rich conossieur behind it all, has been sentenced to two years and had money confiscated from his estate, given to the Louvre, part of which the museum used to compensate Gertrude and Alice’s maid for the loss of her husband, the murdered guard.

Steward has Gertrude sometimes speak in her signature simplistic, repetitive style, which is fun. The speech she makes at the salon is based on her ideas of human personality types from her 1925 novel The Making of Americans:

“To add it all up then,” she said, “though there are millions of human beings there are only a few kinds of human beings. And each person has a different amount of his kind in him and that makes a different being of each one of the millions of that kind. And then there are added mixtures to complicate things. But each person has a bottom nature, and that separates them” (p. 46).

And so on. There’s a reference also to her 1914 book of poetry called, Tender Buttons. There’s a chapter written in stream-of-conscious as Gertrude takes a walk in the Luxembourg gardens with her poodle, Basket. It begins, “I am a lot smarter than Molly Bloom and anyway walking with poor Basket limping along here in the gardens of the Luxembourg is always conducive to my thinking clear and limpid thoughts and the clear air helps clear my head which is stuffy enough these days…” (p.145). Most of the book is written in straightforward prose and dialogue, but there is one other interesting chapter where, in ecstasy after having made love to the very handsome traffic cop, Eduardo Quisse, Johnny McAndrews imagines how one could rhapsodize about the encounter in the manner of famous writers of the past, “a melange of Shakespeare, Whitman, Gide, Mann, and a few others, perhaps some songs from the Arabian Nights… even lines from the Bible, the Song of Solomon…”

“Parisians I hail you! at the close of day I rose and went about the capitol in the streets, in the broad ways to seek him whom my soul loved, and there at the corner of St. Germain and the rue Bonaparte I saw him, struck be the expression of this well-made man which appeared not only in his face… It was in his limbs and joints also, it was curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists. It was in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees. Dress did not hide him. His strong sweet quality struck through the cotton and broadcloth.” (pp. 184-185). It goes on for two pages.

It’s a small book, in length and stature. It was fun. I’m grateful to have read Samuel M. Steward and gratefully ready to leave him behind and move on to weightier stuff.