The Deadliest Art The Deadliest Art is the second novel in a series featuring Police Detective Michel Danton. The first book, To Die In Provence (1998), is available in paperback from Forge Books. Read an excerpt from the book View The Deadliest Art flash movie

"This sequel to the author's tremendously exciting To Die in Provence finds French detective Michel Danton investigating the murder of a young American girl whose body washed up on the beach of a popular resort near Aix en Provence... Like the first Danton novel, this is a very hard-edged thriller, with expertly conceived characters. The author blurs the line between good and bad, between hero and villain, taking us through the various levels of society... [T]he Danton tales portray violence graphically, almost uncomfortably so, but the intensity has a purpose. The sense of vicarious participation in the action is so strong that we feel as if the characters are about to climb out of their violent world and into ours. Only Thomas Harris is as good at creating a mood, at making us feel as though we are a part of the story."
David Pitt, Booklist

"Bogner's crisply intercut plot contains good atmospheric detail... American and French sensibilities are cleverly contrasted and even minor characters are interesting. This is a great beach read for those in search of entertainment and titillation."
Publishers Weekly, June 25, 2001

"A new Norman Bogner novel is always a reason to cheer... a powerful police procedural that hooks the audience... intelligently constructed to keep readers guessing and reading (set aside time for one sitting)... a powerfully entertaining, fast-paced story line that defines what a thriller should read like."
Harriet Klausner, Bookbrowser

An update from Norman Bogner
...and chat about The Deadliest Art

Welcome Everyone,

I'm really happy to take some time off and get in touch with the people who read my work, have visited my Web Pages, and have also been gracious enough to contact me.

I quit smoking and am celebrating yet another smoke free day. I haven't been in a bad temper, but at times I feel needy. I'm still drinking some good wine and my vodkas before dinner. Unfortunately, my wife had to pick this time to go on diet number #?. So there goes the Cassoulet and the wonderful daubes, the sauces smelling of fresh herbs and garlic which we used to soak up with buttered breads and afterwards the cheeses lathered on heels of baguettes.

As a Francophile, I try to keep abreast of the latest goings on in Los Angeles. The city has gone French crazy with restaurants opening and closing with astonishing regularity. Food reviewers are still writing pretentious articles about the deconstruction of lamb stew and nouvelle cuisine. That's when a dish has been sculpted into something bizarre, with hulking bits of barely-cooked mystery meat, layered on obscure lettuce foundations. Oh, yes, yellow tomatoes and husks of some kind are draped around this melange.

While working on To Die in Provence, the sister book to The Deadliest Art -- it may yet be a series -- I considered the fact that I had created a world and really cared deeply about my principal characters. My attachment to Michel Danton, my French detective, and his American fiancée, Jennifer Bowen, an art historian, continues. In between my mainstream novels, I find the change of pace and revisiting Provence, where I lived for some time, a source of renewal. I also get to write books with subject matter that won't quite work in a mainstream form.

Life should be delicious, suspenseful and intriguing. These are the principal elements in The Deadliest Art, my new novel. On this menu, you'll find Provence, good food and murder. I have investigated a truly dark side of our society. And you won't find it on your 11 o'clock news. The reader and I get to make house calls in an underground society and sub culture that we might be curious about but don't necessarily wish to inhabit.

Never in the history of civilization have so many people been so deeply in love with themselves. Me, Myself, and I have become the shibboleths of this new society. How do I feel, what do I think, what kind of impression am I making. No one seems to give a damn about the feelings of other people because so many are so totally consumed with self. The cell phone perfectly illustrates this. While others are trying to have a conversation or celebrating an occasion in a restaurant, scrunched in their seats at the local movie theater, or at a concert, others are jabbering away and shouting over the phones and they don't care if it bothers you one bit. Whether you're driving your car and about to be sideswiped by some monstrous SUV playing pounding rap or having your home invaded by noisy neighbors, manners lose every time to self empowerment.

Now this behavior isn't merely uncivilized, it is grotesquely narcissistic. In this new novel, I try to deal with an individual who epitomizes this type of conduct. The character in question certainly has some charming qualities, but is besotted with himself.

Quite ironically, along with these ego-driven actions, we have people who, although successful in one area, really, truly, want to be and look like someone else. Despite the infinite godlike love of self, no one seems to be comfortable in his own skin. Men and women are working their bodies to death. This mindless activity and the juice bar discussions it engenders have little to do with achieving good health. What these people want is actually a delusion: an unrealizable ideal that fosters the mirage of control.

At the end of my street there is a well-known plastic surgeon. Without fail, whenever I take a walk, someone comes prancing out looking like a clone of Pamela Anderson. The guys are also remodeling: they've become personal body contractors, busy having their pecs done and liposuction in unexpected places. They don't shave, wear undershirts, stink, and get their hair streaked and chopped up so they can look like Brad Pitt in some coked-out disco.

Garrett Brant, my character, is a superb tattooist who makes a great deal of money tattooing, but is this enough? No, not by a long shot, because Garrett sees himself as a great artist. This lust for glamour and immortality eventually drives him to murder.

As a young man, Garrett fell under the influence of an art mentor who taught him what to appreciate. Garrett developed a special feeling, or more accurately, a passion for the work of Paul Gauguin. Now it's one thing to go to a museum and see the work of great artists, but it's quite another to actually believe, as Garrett does, that he can do better.

We seem to be living in a culture and surrounded by people who want to be in the arts, whether as painters, actors, film directors or writers. Why should this be so? Is it the quest for fame which is driving the untalented to these extremes? Isn't doing a job, or accomplishing something good at work, having a decent love life and family enough? Clearly not.

Do we go to a baseball game, watch Mark McGwire park one downtown, and think we can hit longer home runs? Has anyone who has seen Michael Jordan think he can play basketball better? If you catch Tiger Woods launching a drive, does anyone actually believe he can hit a ball longer or putt better? No, of course not. Athletes are the exception to these self-realization fantasies.

But down deep everyone thinks he could be an artist and achieve immortality. Doesn't everyone have a book in him? In our heart of hearts we all want to be celebrities.

Now the consequences of Garrett's crimes, committed in the name of art, seemed like an exciting and worthy stimulus for Michel Danton. Michel's unraveling of an inscrutable tragedy because of someone's false image of himself was a theme worth exploring. It reflected our current society, and also had a mysterious component that I had not previously encountered. Among other things, this involved the time frame and presented some of the most challenging moments I've ever had in my career.

A body is discovered at the opening. How and why it got there when the murder was totally unplanned and committed by a stranger thousands of miles away at an earlier time is what attracted me to the story. It is the progress of murder which became the adventure, an inextricable part of the book's structure, along with the insidious twists of fate which determined this.

In The Deadliest Art, I used as the theme and epigraph the title of Gauguin's greatest painting:

"Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?"

Throughout the composition of this novel, I felt like I was walking in a minefield. If I took one false step, I would betray not only myself, but also the reader.

P.S. By the way, LUCKY, my five-year-old Flame Point Himalayan, is in the photo with me on the main page of this web site. He rules the house and his every whim is my command.

All content © 1998-2001 by Norman Bogner (No Inc.).