“Ministry of All Fools”: Carol Carnac’s Murder as a Fine Art (1953), “Cozy” Crime, and the Crisis of the “Contemporary”

Fictional murders are just what we assume the doctor would order if reliable medical advice, especially in this age of unfounded attacks on science—were within easy reach of our purse.  I won’t go so far as to call mysteries the patent medicine of our day; but I am convinced they are taken freely and frequently as a temporary remedy for the widespread malady of which they are symptomatic.

Not to generalize from the small sample of my experience, but only yesterday—and “yesterday” only because I can never get my act together so as to leave “today” unedited—I walked home after paying an overdue visit to the Gayberystwyth Books, that indispensable local dispensary of diversity-affirming queerness, with a copy of Jaime West’s Death on the Pier (2022), a murder mystery set in 1933 Brighton.  All the while, I am screaming bloody murder at the sight of division sowers like Trump and Farage who are determined to push the democracies they blight ever closer toward Berlin 1933.

Meanwhile, so-called “cozy crime” is back on the pop-cultural menu.  Mysteries have become part of a regular diet, healthy or otherwise, followed, like a regimen of killer recipes from a keto cookbook, by millions of contemporary fiction bingers, be they bookworms or streaming service subscribers.  Defying the warning label, I am currently ingesting Not to Be Taken (1937-38), a serialized whodunit by Anthony Berkeley published in the US under the title “A Puzzle in Poison.”

“One Man’s Poison” might be a suitable alternative title for Murder as a Fine Art (1953), my previous dose of the genre, even though the weapon employed by “another man”—whose identity I shall refrain from divulging here—is, despite its material refinement, rather less sophisticated once applied: a pompous government employee at the fictional Ministry of Art is brought down—splatter of brains and all—by a giant Canova bust, for which the victim had long expressed a violent dislike.

The crime novelist determining upon that choice weapon was Edith Caroline Rivett (1894-1958), writing as Carol Carnac.  Some five years before assuming this guise, Rivett had started her career as a mystery writer under the decidedly more ambiguous name of E. C. R. Lorac.

Like so many resourceful female authors in history, Rivett shrouded her identity, even as she reveals facets of it in her writing.  Lorac’s Death of an Author (1935), for example, self-consciously reflects on Rivett’s experience as a woman who chose to make creativity her line of work.  Murder as a Fine Art is similarly personal if periphrastic, as the narrative, right down to her pick of victim, encodes Rivett’s attitudes contemporary British politics, of which Murder as a Fine Art serves, to some extent, as a critique.

Recognizing it to be political commentary in no way detracts from the fact that Rivett’s no to say that Murder as a Fine Art is deserving of the verdict “riveting.”  Now, even as I imagine harrumphs of exasperation coming my way like so many poison darts in response to that appalling pun, I venture to belabor my figure of speech still further.  After all, Rivett herself was inclined to play name games, one of the principal crime solvers in the Carnac canon being a certain Inspector Ryvet.  Besides, the verb “rivet” (meaning, “holding fast so as to make incapable of movement”) certainly captures the way in which the victim in Murder as a Fine Art is pinned to the floor.

Granted, death by iconoclasm may not exactly suggest the finesse intimated by the title of the novel; but the way the crime is executed is certainly disguised artfully.  The pulped somebody in question was a government official at the Ministry—and a fierce proponent of modern or contemporary art—who, as it turns out, was too easily duped as to its monetary value and too worried about having his ego shattered to admit being had.

There we have it: crime, punishment, and the dish of revenge—a justice too crude perhaps to be called poetic—served stone cold by an author who, as Martin Edwards points out in his introduction to the 2025 British Library edition of the novel, had studied art (at Central School of Arts and Crafts in London), and who, in Murder as a Fine Art, invites her readers to rejoice with her as a crushing blow is administered to bureaucracy personified.

No, there is nothing mystifying about the current murder mystery revival, which I, for one, have welcomed, as much as I have dreaded the circumstances I suspect to have giving rise to a relish for the methodical counting down and discounting of human lives as so many fictional bodies in the library, the penguin pool, or whatever sanitized refuge writerly imagination has contrived to retrofit as a temporary mortuary at a comfortable remove from the killing fields of the present.

After all, we can readily imagine ourselves not counting in the scheme of things to come.  With a news-induced fatalism, we may feel relieved temporarily to step away from our social media bubbles to settle down for a game afoot.  Playing along, with a suspicion that, I suspect, comes easier to us these days, we look over the shoulders of the celebrated—and, for the most part, infallible—sleuths of fiction to compile and revise our lists of likely malefactors according to their scheduled arrivals and departures, eventually, reassuringly and, with an agreeable modicum of bafflement, to be left, having had all options withdrawn by nursery rhyme logic or reason, with the gratifying finality of “And Then There Were None.”

An appetite for detective fiction feeds on—or at least thrives in—an atmosphere of uncertainty.  The everyday thwarts our hopes of getting a clear picture, much less a complete one, of complex situations in the making.  We are left instead with inadequate snapshots of an evolving scene, sketchy landscapes that are a composite of a past as yet unprocessed and a future that seems to be mapped out without our knowledge.

It is no coincidence that, as a genre, the whodunit was at its height in Britain during the years between the World Wars.  And that may well be where we are now, at this jaw-droppingly epic junk pile of a juncture, even though the global conflict upon us may not be a war waged by nations or oligarchic conglomerates against each other but by humankind against the planet at large.

Granted, my armchair is nothing but a modified soap box with optional upholstery.  I am too uneasy to remain seated for long, and no additional throw pillow, certainly not the one strategically positioned occasionally to muffle my howls of anguish, could convince me that we are not in crisis mode.

To be sure, the momentary relief of cushions and cozies is wasted on the perennially contented, as, too, is my contention that, in the murk of recklessness—the promotion of conspiracy theories and willful disinformation at the expense of scientific research, forecasts and predictive modeling—there is a growing demand for the orderliness and ultimate transparency that a well-constructed fair-play whodunit can provide, not least since what we are witnessing in the former heart of the West is by and large a perversion of same: the politicization of the law and its enforcement, the rigging of crime statistics, and the indiscriminate raids carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in which US citizens and international tourists alike have become targets.

“Ministry of All Fools” readily comes to mind.  Readily because I just read it.  The phrase is sarcastically deployed to lambast the fictional ministry that is the crime scene of Murder as a Fine Art—and the person coining it is no other than the minister at its helm.  As Edwards suggests, the character was a “mouthpiece” for Rivett who, “like many of her contemporaries, […] was disgruntled about the failure of postwar government to live up to expectations.”

“Government patronage of the arts is a mistake,” the Minister protests with what Rivett no doubt intended to be received as disarming frankness.  “It leads to every sort of abuse, and the artists, quite rightly, resent it.”  The assumption as to the views of contemporary art practitioners is not substantiated, let alone challenged. 

Never mind patronage, however misguided.  In the Ministry of Art, absurdity is the order of the day.  Its headquarters are staffed with hundreds of presumably well-meaning civil servants, few of whom, as the author has it, know the first thing about contemporary art, samples of which are housed and displayed there.  The official head—himself a former opponent of the Ministry as created, if Rivett used recent history as a framework for her fiction, by the Labour administration under Attlee that preceded the disastrous return to office by Tory PM Winston Churchill in 1951—repeatedly proclaims his bewilderment at the sight of the modern art by which, owing to his predecessor, he is surrounded in the building.

Meanwhile staff are tasked with cataloguing, collecting and curating modern art on behalf a nation that, according to the populist premise of the novel, collectively looked askance at misguided government efforts to reform or culturally uplift.

“I think this arrangement is much more intelligent,” one of the “young women” whose job it is to make sense of the ministry’s modern art collection.

“Chronologically it makes sense.” She began to read the notices above the pigeon-holes, and the Minister listened, entranced: “Post-Impressionists, Expressionists, Neo-Realists, Fauvistes, Cubists, Neo-Cubists, Futurists, Vorticists, Constructivists, Purists—.”

“It’s much too arbitrary,” a colleague protests.

“You can’t reduce art-movements to systematic planning,” said one of the men, and the other put in:

“We haven’t any real Vorticists.  It was a one-man movement anyway, and nobody here is qualified to distinguish between Cubists and Neo-Cubists, and the examples we have of either school would disgrace any one-horse gallery in the provinces.  If I had my way I’d burn the lot.”

Throughout Murder as a Fine Art, Rivett draws on her practical training as well as her studies of art history for plotting and characterization—or character assassination.  “Am I to understand that you are painting this picture?” Chief Inspector Rivers—another name not far removed from Rivett’s own—interrogates a suspicious female creative, a potentially complex character that is sidelined by her genetrix.  “You had a palette and brushes in your hand when you opened the door.”

Someone who alleges to be an artist but cannot tell a brush from a palette knife must be a phony—an argument that, by 1953, was increasingly difficult to support in the new age of Pollockian drip painting.

Rivett, who lets her characters do the debating instead of installing a commentating narrator, seems rather more forgiving when it comes to a Minister who professes not to “understand” modern art.  “What seems to me to be shameful is to pretend to understand the things when you don’t,” Chief Inspector Rivers responds.

Understanding, of course, is not to be confused with readability, as it so often is to this day.  In 1957 lecture on the avant-garde, art critic Meyer Schapiro argued that what made “painting and sculpture so interesting in [his] times is their high degree of non-communication.”  Modern art, unlike murder mysteries, are inscrutable.  They elude interpretation and defy judgment according to standards that precede it.

Rivett’s views on the contemporary artworld—then on the cusp of emancipation from the easel, as in Abstract Expressionism, traditions predicated on a hierarchy of “high” and “low,” as in Pop art, as well as the art establishment, as in Outsider Art—seems to have been indebted to the rough if enormously popular outline of E. H. Gombrich’s seminal survey The Story of Art, first published in 1950.

“Contemporary—what a word, what a senseless concept to pay homage to,” one of the characters, who has the ear of Chief Inspector, exclaims “morosely.”  Gombrich was similarly dismissive of the “contemporary,” adding in a 1966 edition of his bestselling western art compendium:

Can one write the history of art ‘up to the present day’ as one can perhaps write the history of aviation? Many critics and teachers hope and believe that one can, but I am less sure.

The historian’s objective, ostensibly, was objectivity.  “It is the job of the historian,” Gombrich declared,

to make intelligible what actually happens.  It is the job of the critic to criticise what happens.  I shall confine my criticism of Pop Art such as I know it at the present moment to its exclusion from a book that contains illustrations of Michelangelo and Rembrandt.  Perhaps a prophet would be able to predict whether a master will arise who will turn such unpromising material into art.  I do not pretend to know.

No “criticism” there.  What “actually happens”—the currents of the art world—is being discounted, even in the act of passing judgement on the present, as not yet fit for judgment, even as Rivett judges her present,  in the scheme of things that, academically, was predicated on a distinction between high art and low culture—a distinction Rivett, perhaps unwittingly, reiterates in the title of Murder as a Fine Art.

Surely, as a crime writer, Rivett must have considered the low standing of the genre in literary circles, in or vis-a-vis which she, strategically quoting Robert Browning and C. Day Lewis (neither of which are named), insists on positioning herself.  

From Browning’s poem “A Grammarian’s Funeral,” first published a century before Murder as a Fine Art, her well-educated characters derive this dismissal of our preoccupation with the contemporary: “What’s time? Leave Now for dogs and apes! / Man has Forever.”  “Not contemporary poetry,” the Minister replies.

From “Transitional Poems” by her left-leaning contemporary C. Day Lewis, himself a writer of mysteries under the pen name Nicholas Blake, Rivett appropriates the snippet—again, not identified by title or author and, as in the case of Browning, given to a character involved in solving the crime: “…  the intellectual Quixotes of the age, / Prattling of abstract art.”

“Prattling” encapsulates Rivett’s antagonistic stance toward theory and discourse on contemporary art, assessment and advocacy of which, from official quarters, she dismisses as so much hooey.

And yet, folly is not felony.  It may strike us as plain wrong, but it is not codifiable.  It is subjective, and the suspicion of being subjected to it offers no legal recourse, which makes folly all the more exasperating.  Essential to crime, its solving, and its presentation as a puzzle, method is powerless to mind-boggling senselessness.  The finite puzzle is not equal to infinite puzzlement that the perplexing flux of the contemporary provokes—unless, that is, the launch pad of lunacy can be neatly cordoned off as a crime scene.

It is telling that Murder as a Fine Art does not conclude with a case-closing arrest that is customary in the dénouement of cozy crime.  It does, however, end with the closing down of the Ministry of Art, once indictable crime—including fraud, corruption and murder—has been demonstrated to be the manageable manifestations of madness.  In other words, Rivett is at criminalizing what, to her mind, is the source of contemporary malaise.  How many of us are not guilty of the same approach when we voice grievances we call legitimate?

Murder as a Fine Art—unlike the declarative sentence “Murder is a fine art”—hints at the design and dialectic of the novel as a commentary on its chosen milieu.  The contrast between and ultimate reconciliation of a mystery to be systematically mastered and a systemic miasma to dispel so as not to be overmastered by it is so contrived, and presented in such a self-conscious way, that it governs the narrative to reveal itself as its raison d’être.

As an art historian, curator, and former academic, I appreciate that Murder as a Fine Art reflects frustration with the contemporary as unclassifiable and with bureaucracy as the worst way of going about getting a handle on it.  At the same time, the characters Rivett favors espouse views inimical to the protection of our ever-evolving arts.

Not that Rivett could have foreseen the threats to the democratic principle of “government of the people, by the people, for the people” that are being exerted in the USA, where, debates about what should matter in the arts and the institutions set aside for their care, are once again being answered, all too definitively, by neo-fascists oligarchs who, not unlike the National Socialists of the 1930s, aim to exert authoritarian control of our lives and do away with critical discourse in order to rewrite our cultural histories in line with a new order, cutting off ostensibly loose ends or tying them up for disposal like so many dead ones.

In times of existential crisis—meaning times like ours, which are antithetical to the diversity of contemporary cultures—art and literature, high or low, need to be primed for “murder” to go for the metaphorical kill. Pacifist that I am, I am “fine” with that.