A Real Piece of Work

Meet Dakota Stevens, P.I.

Dakota Stevens is a modern PI, medium-boiled, who never drinks while on a case. As a former FBI agent with experience in the field and the lab, Dakota combines the wit and grit of PIs Marlowe and Spenser with the ratiocination of Sherlock Holmes.

Meet His “Watson,” Svetlana Krüsh.

A Ukrainian–American chess champion with runway legs, predator eyes and fluency in seven languages, Svetlana Krüsh brings worldly panache to their cases, or, as Svetlana would have you believe, she “solves the crimes and handles the money.”

Meet the Novel, A Real Piece of Work.

A Real Piece of Work delves into a world of forged and stolen art, secret identities and murder. In a case that leads from Manhattan and Millbrook to the Catskills and Washington, D.C., what begins as the simple recovery of a painting soon reveals an international art scam and a chilling secret that has remained hidden since WWII.

Is A Real Piece of Work based in fact?

Yes. While this is a work of fiction, it is also the product of wondering “what if” in relation to a number of historical facts. In a famous 1964 Playboy interview, the brilliant Vladimir Nabokov had this to say about the mysterious process by which he began to assemble a work of fiction:

“All I know is that at a very early stage of the novel’s development I get this urge to garner bits of straw and fluff…After the first shock of recognition—a sudden sense of ‘this is what I’m going to write’—the novel starts to breed by itself…”

For me, the two main “bits of straw and fluff” were these:

The original of Paul Gauguin’s "Vase de Fleurs," one of the paintings Ely Sakhai commissioned to be forged.

1. The fraud committed by convicted art dealer Ely Sakhai.

2. Even after 60 years (since the end of WWII), over 100,000 works of art were still missing; yet, previously lost works were being discovered with regularity.

There were many other bits of straw and fluff that contributed to the novel’s coalescing, including the Monuments Men, the Munich Central Collecting Point, and the Quedlinburg Hoard; however, once I became curious, it was really the articles and government records themselves that prodded me.

While writing the novel, I collected over 2,000 pages of research on art looting during WWII, art forging, and restitution. Sources of material include the National Archives, the National Gallery Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

Portrait of Ely Sakhai. Artist unknown.

I found this to be a fascinating subject, and hopefully you will, too. To that end, if you purchase the novel when it’s released, you’ll receive an access password (preventing spoilers) that will give you access to PDFs of the dozens of government reports and other documents I consulted in writing the book. One example I can give you (without creating a spoiler) is this PDF of Art Claims Filed with US Govt by 1956. It’s a HUGE file showing close to 10,000 claims of lost art, so the idea that thousands of pieces are still floating around in the art world isn’t nearly as far-fetched as it might seem.

How long did it take you to write?

Taking the manuscript through 9 or 10 drafts (even then there were still minor issues) took about 3 years. However, since Dakota and Svetlana were fleshed out in the first book, the second novel in the series, The Rich Are Different, took considerably less time.

Does the story borrow at all from your own life?

In a way, yes. Growing up, I thought I wanted to become an FBI agent. In college, I started out as a forensic chemistry major and also took courses in criminology and criminalistics. I spent several weeks shadowing a scientist with the Massachusetts State Crime Lab, visiting the lab several times and watching him testify in court. By the time I graduated, with a degree in philosophy, I was more interested in reading about detectives than I was in becoming one, so the Dakota Stevens series represents something of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” Put another way, James Joyce said that all fiction is “imagined autobiography,” so the Dakota books are how I’d like to imagine my life might have turned out had I gone through with my FBI plans.

Is there anything else you want readers to know?

I wrote these books to be entertaining for readers, and to be read. This is why I’m publishing them on Kindle.

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A Real Piece of Work — Table of Contents
Because there are many chapters—too many to list here—you can download the table of contents as a PDF: TOC for A Real Piece of Work by Chris Orcutt