At the crossroads of Art and Crime

When criminal lawyer and criminologist Christos Markogiannakis decided to encounter murderers on the written page rather than face them across the aisle, little did he realize that he’d embark on a fulltime writing career, probing into the sinister collusion of art and crime throughout history. Are works of art innately troubling? Can crime be considered an art form? Is crime but an ugly depiction of human darkness? Christos Markogiannakis meditates on these questions with Sudha Nair-Iliades.

Christos Markogiannakis at Athenée © Giannis Seferos

We’re glad you moved from practising law to writing crime fiction. What prompted you to give up a promising career to writing murder mysteries?

Although I enjoyed practising (criminal) law, I couldn’t bear the thought that I’d be doing it for the rest of my life. I now realize that it was meant to be a stepping-stone to criminology and then writing. And I’m grateful for it, because studying law taught me how to develop my thoughts, and practising criminal law allowed me to meet and understand criminals, both of which came in handy. When my first book in France was published and was well received, I decided to give writing my all and gave up my career as a lawyer. I never regretted it! I prefer murderers on the written page than in real life.

You split your time between Paris and Athens, and you’ve had crime scenes set in both cities. Which of the two capitals is a natural stage for a perfect murder mystery?

I love both cities, and I love Greece and France, the country that raised me and the country that gave me the chance to become me. I set crimes in both Paris and Athens, but in a different way: Paris, with its indisputable beauty and artistic character, inspired the criminartistic series of books, which deal with murder as represented in art and as a form of art, while Athens with its harsh exterior, often surrealistic reality and beautiful light gave birth to my police captain, Christophoros Markou, and his murder investigations. To each city, its murders, either criminartistic or whodunits!

You’ve been researching crime in art over centuries. From Magritte’s assassin to Caravaggio’s cardsharps and Warhol’s take on race riots in the US, do you believe that the most compelling artworks are those that depict murder, intrigue, jealousy?

According to Durkheim (one of the fathers of Sociology), a society without crime doesn’t exist. So, criminal behavior, like so many others within a group, has found its place in art, from writing and theater to visual arts, from ancient Greek amphorae to contemporary TV series. And these works were and remain compelling for two reasons: To begin with, they give artists the opportunity to explore and expose extreme human emotions, create gripping subject matter, and ignite intense feelings for those reading or looking at it, as art should engender (I love the story of Parisian ladies fainting at the realistic depiction of a freshly severed head in a painting by Regnault, entitled Exécution sans jugement, when it was first exhibited in 1872). Secondly, living these dangerous situations vicariously, through art, allows us (the readers and spectators) to feel safe in our own environment and at the same time evacuate our own violent instincts through an anodyne channel.

Is crime an art form? Would you agree with murderers calling themselves artists or geniuses?

It was an English 19th-century philosopher, Thomas De Quincey, who attached aesthetics to crime, provokingly defining “Murder as One of the Fine Arts.” This work is the cornerstone of my criminartistic books, where I take readers by the hand, and we become witnesses and CSI experts of mythological, biblical, or historical crime scenes, standing before works of art in museums.

Do you think that glorifying crime glamorizes violence?

This is a question tantalizing criminologists for decades. It’s like asking if violent video games push children to be violent, or on the contrary, if they help them manifest their instincts in a harmless way. Will someone become a murderer only by looking at a superbly depicted murder on canvas or reading beautiful words describing it? I don’t believe so. We are capable of distinguishing between reality and fantasy or fiction, between Art and Act, to put it in criminartistic terms. If someone isn’t capable of this, there are other problems, other factors that might lead them to violence, a cleverly thought-out whodunit or a perfectly directed TV series isn’t the cause; we must look deeper. Can we blame the film Taxi Driver for the assassination attempt against President Ronald Reagan, by John Hinckley Jr., or The Catcher in the Rye for the murder of John Lennon by Chapman? No, they were just the triggers, and pretexts for committing a crime can be found anywhere. This debate on theory vs. practice, art vs. act, is skillfully treated in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope.

The perfect crime is....

... harder than you think, especially nowadays when technology offers such powerful tools to forensic teams and the police. So, for me as a criminologist, the perfect crimes are those included in the dark figure of crime, the unreported and undiscovered ones. If you don’t know a crime has been committed, you will never look for, and find, the perpetrator.

In real life, murderers are neither artists nor geniuses - no matter what they might consider themselves to be. They are most often ordinary people, just like you and I, which is even more frightening.

Your books have been set at the Louvre and at the Musée d’Orsay - contrasting the majesty of these buildings and their precious artworks by taking your readers into the dark, macabre world of crime. What is it about museums and their art collections that appeal to you as a writer?

They are indeed majestic, but both the Louvre and the Orsay buildings are related to murders! Before becoming a museum, the Louvre was a royal palace and the place where the horrific killing of the Parisian Protestants started on the night of August 23–24, 1572, the episode we call the Saint Bartholomew’s Massacre. The Louvre’s walls and floors are literally soaked in blood. The Orsay was built and served as a train station for more than 4 decades since 1900. Trains, train stations, and passengers are synonymous with anonymity and are often used as material for crime fiction (from Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie, to Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith, or La bête humaine by Émile Zola). Furthermore, the Orsay station welcomed back French survivors from the most atrocious genocide of all, the Holocaust, when the concentration camps were liberated. To answer your question, now, when I moved to Paris, not knowing anybody, and not speaking French, museums were my refuge. Standing before a painting that fascinates me, King Edward V and the Duke of York in the Tower of London or The Princes in the Tower by Delaroche in the Louvre, and looking at it through a criminologist’s lens, I realized that murder is omnipresent in art, in every era, just like in society, but no one had written a book about it! It was a moment of revelation, and the trigger for the manhunt in these two museums, looking for murder(er)s.

Are there any crime writers who have influenced your brand of ‘crime art’ writing?

The one who gave me the theoretical foundation for my criminartistic quests is Thomas De Quincey. My interpretation of what we see in art is based on Greek and Roman mythology, the Bible, and History, but also the literary sources that inspired the artists, from Euripides to Shakespeare, from Zola to Hugo. As for my whodunits, I’m a fan of the golden age of detective fiction, the 1920’s and ‘30s that influenced my style and drew my attention to the characters, their psychology, and motives, rather than raw violence and blood-lusting narrative.

Christos’ books, The Louvre Murder Club / Scènes de crime au Louvre, (Le Passage Editions,) The Orsay Murder Club / Scènes de crime à Orsay, (Le Passage Editions), Au 5e étage de la faculté de droit, (Albin Michel and Livre de Poche Editions), Mourir en scène, (Albin Michel Editions) are available in the Lexikopoleio Bookstore at Stasinou 13, Pangrati), on Amazon. fr, and in the Louvre and Orsay Museum gift shops. Christos’ latest Greek crime fiction novel, Mythistorima me Kleidi(Minoas Editions) is sold in all Greek bookstores and online.