“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen…”

(Note: This post is the second installment in my author’s commentary for The Icon Thief, covering Chapter 1. You can read the first few chapters of the novel here.)

As I’ve said before, there are two scenes that are impossible for a writer to screw up, no matter how hard he tries: a jury delivering its verdict, and an auction. In the former case, no matter how tedious a legal thriller has been up to that point, when the judge takes the note from the foreman and tells the defendant to rise, there’s always a little frisson of suspense, even though we’ve seen the same scene a million times before. Similarly, auctions are structured as miniature contests of will, which, even without any context, are totally clear at once. In both cases, unlike most scenes in fiction, in which the author needs to work hard to define the stakes, we’re handed all the components for suspense right off the shelf. (This is another reason why even bad sports movies tend to suck us in when the big game comes down to that final pitch.) You can’t go back to this well too often, but it’s nice when you can. Which is one reason I’m glad that I was able to put a big auction scene right at the start of The Icon Thief.

Looking back, I can also see that an auction scene serves another useful purpose in the first chapter of a novel, which is that it immediately gets you inside the protagonist’s head. The main character of The Icon Thief, Maddy Blume, is by far the most complex figure I’ve ever had to create: she’s clever, ambitious, and insecure, capable of making incredibly smart choices on a tactical level but very poor choices when it comes to her own life, prone to jealousy and vanity, ready to use other people when necessary, but also vulnerable to being used herself. There are a lot of layers here, and there’s no way to get them across in one scene. Fortunately, that isn’t necessary. As I’ve noted in my discussion of the opening scene of The Godfather, characters become real, not through pages of introspection, but through scenes in which the reader can follow them from one clear objective to another. And an auction provides the clearest objective imaginable. Once you’ve sweated with Maddy through that opening scene at Sotheby’s, I’d like to think that you’re at least mildly interested in what she does next, even as her many complexities and contradictions gradually begin to reveal themselves.

The resulting chapter was a real pleasure to write. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, this scene is based on a true incident, in which an unknown bidder paid a record price for Picasso’s Dora Maar au Chat at Sotheby’s in 2006. To research it, I went to auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in New York and took detailed notes on auction procedure, behavior, and atmosphere. I learned about such salesroom arcana as the lighthouse bid, in which a bidder holds his paddle in the air and keeps it there, indicating that he’s willing to buy the item at any price. As always, there was a lot of stuff that I cut for the sake of time. In particular, the original draft included at least a page of material leading up to the main event, the auction of Study for Étant Donnés, that I excised to cut to the chase. And the result is, I think, a really good chapter, perhaps the best in the entire novel. If nothing else, it’s one of the few scenes I can look at now without seeing a lot of things I wish I could change, and it’s the section I always read at author events, like the one I’m scheduled to do in California next week. And I feel especially lucky that it’s the first official chapter in the entire book.

As always, there are a lot of small touches and inside jokes that are probably of interest only to me. Study for Étant Donnés is the fiftieth lot of the evening—which means, of course, that it comes right after the crying of lot forty-nine. The names of the two phone clerks, Vicky and Julian, are nods to my favorite movie, which will be referenced repeatedly in the novel to come. And the most significant moment in the scene didn’t come until late in the process. Quite simply, I didn’t know how to end it, and even as I was preparing to go out to publishers, the ending of this chapter was very weak. It wasn’t until I went back and reread the chapter, using the principle of the standing set, that I realized that the answer was right in front of me. Earlier in the chapter, Maddy looks up at the skybox above the salesroom floor and notices that someone is there, although she can’t see who. When I wrote it, this was just a throwaway detail—designed, perhaps, just to show off my own location research. Much later, however, I began to wonder if I did, in fact, know who was watching from that skybox. And when I look back at the chapter now, it seems like he was there the entire time, unknown to me, waiting for the right moment.