DRIVING NORTH ON CHICAGO’S LAKE Shore Drive one day in 2012, I found myself captivated by a radio news report about the arrest of Rita Crundwell in a town named Dixon, Illinois. I wasn’t alone. As more details of Crundwell’s epic crime came out, the wider public was riveted by the fact that a government employee had managed to embezzle $54 million over 20 years—by herself—from a small township. But while news teams and investigators scrambled to find out and explain how Crundwell had pulled off what would turn out to be the largest municipal fraud in US history, I was more interested in imagining what it might have felt like for someone to do what she did. What kind of mentality does one need to show up to work every day, to interact with colleagues and neighbors and friends, while stealing from them year after year? What impact does sustaining a double life have on one’s psyche? I was curious about how such a person might deceive others and how she might necessarily deceive herself.
From there my focus moved away from Rita Crundwell toward a main character I began to see in my mind: a woman with significant gifts of intelligence and drive, who lives in a tight-knit rural community, and is astonished by a sudden—and not entirely welcome—obsession with art. Becky Farwell came together as soon as I understood the nature of her all-encompassing desire: the way she has no context for loving art and for her ability to instantly suss out a good painting, growing up as she did without exposure to serious art. The way Becky craves paintings is inborn, as much of a surprise to her as to anyone else. As Crash Davis tells Nuke LaLoosh in Bull Durham, “When you were a baby, the gods reached down and turned your right arm into a thunderbolt.” Once I developed this part of her character, I saw that the world of contemporary art collecting—with its inherent high stakes, big money, and class conflict—was a perfect arena for Becky to play out her complex relationship with the truth.
Beyond knowing the basic facts of Rita Crundwell’s crime, I purposely learned little about the person herself. In making up the fictional world of The Talented Miss Farwell, I left myself plenty of space to create characters and a place I could develop from scratch.
My fictional town of Pierson shares topographical features with Dixon, but isn’t meant to stand in for the people or businesses of the actual place. In the same way, Becky Farwell is not Rita Crundwell. What often happens for novelists is that the bare circumstances of a real situation quickly give way to an entirely different imagined story, and this was the case for me with The Talented Miss Farwell.
To those who are interested in learning more about Rita Crundwell, I recommend the documentary All the Queen’s Horses. For background on the art world, I found the following books to be both helpful and engrossing: Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton; I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon) by Richard Polsky; and Collecting Art for Love, Money and More by Ethan Wagner and Thea Westreich Wagner.
My title is, of course, in homage to the late great Patricia Highsmith, whose brilliant book was one source of inspiration for the life and crimes of Becky Farwell.