Still Lives by Maria Hummel

Counterpoint, 288 pages, $26

Like a dark, glittering magnet Los Angeles has drawn the attention of many a crime writer. We’ve seen versions of the city by Raymond Chandler, Michael Connolly, Robert Crais, James Ellroy, Erle Stanley Gardner, Timothy Hallinan, Joseph Hansen, the Kellermans, Ross MacDonald, Walter Mosley, T. Jefferson Parker, and a cast of thousands. Their stories are iconic. It's hard to envisage a compellingly different take on the "City of Angels." 

What can Maria Hummel’s museum copyeditor protagonist add to the mix? Maggie Richter, whose name is not revealed until a quarter of the book has passed, moved to Los Angeles with a man she met in Thailand. Although she is an East Coaster, something bad happened there. That is why she ran to Thailand, and that is why she is still running. But she is a copyeditor in a contemporary art museum in Los Angeles, so how bad could it be? There presumably is no one chasing her.

Maggie has lots of friends who also work at the Rocque Museum. She does spin classes with some of them. She drowns her sorrows — especially after her boyfriend dumps her — with some of them. She gossips with some of them and comments on their clothing. Surely this is a chick lit book. Much of the book comes across that way. (And don’t get me started about the “dumb girl going down to the basement where the serial killer is hiding” scenario this book incorporates at the end.) However, author Hummel writes passages that transcend the ill-fitting chick lit label.

Maggie’s ex-boyfriend, Greg, is now the boyfriend of a former enfant terrible of the art world, Kim Lord. She is trying to make a comeback by exhibiting at the Rocque her newest venture, Still Lives, a series of provocative paintings of women who were murdered, women who were famous for being murdered. Then she disappears, right before the gala at the museum to celebrate the exhibition’s opening. Greg has been arrested and, of course, he wants Maggie to help him. Maggie, the broken-hearted idiot, agrees because she knows deep down he couldn’t have had anything to do with Kim’s disappearance. Yawn.

Hummel lifts us out of the been-there-seen-that doldrums by writing about the art world and behind-the-scenes of a museum with an authority. And her writing can leap from the prosaic to the elevating. Here Maggie talks about how the bad stuff in Vermont (her home state), her breakup with Greg, and the fall-out from Kim’s disappearance have depressed her:

Novels now bothered me — too much invention in the narrative felt like a meal with too much sweetness. In the Fitzgerald biography, I had to turn back to the spot where Scott meets Zelda and start all over, only this time their early fascination with each other — their late-night parties and jumping into fountains — didn’t seem giddy and romantic but vain and silly, as if they refused to see the disaster of their lives ahead.

Here’s a long passage from a conversation in a meeting of the Craft Club — a group of Rocque employees who occasionally meet in a conference room to craft and gossip. Jayme, Maggie’s boss, wonders how Kim could bear the gruesome subject matter of her paintings:

No one knows how to respond to this comment, not coming from Jayme, whom we all admire, and who is so private that she works out at a different gym from the rest of us and never stays at happy hour for more than one gin gimlet. Even trickier, we do know what Jayme means — what it must have cost Kim Lord to inhabit these murders — yet saying it aloud strips away the safe armor of our own intellectualization, the same armor that got us through the Jason Rains show on capital punishment, when we each allowed ourselves to sit in a lethal injection chair and watch the syringes come closer. Still Lives is art. Art should shock us. We work at the Rocque.

“Still Lives” is worth reading because Maria Hummel has potential.