Into the Vortex

Tim Simpson #12

by John Malcolm

Tim Simpson arranges a meeting with four strange men who claim to have an important painting by Wyndham Lewis, and he tells no one about the appointment. The heads of White's Bank, where Tim runs the Art Fund, aren't feeling too daring these days; tycoon and tabloid starlet Piers Hargreaves is promising major upheaval at the bank, and now is not the best time for Tim to chase after a painting that may only be an imitation of the master's work. What began as a bid for a valuable canvas soon becomes a search for a killer when two of the painting's owners are murdered, and Tim realizes that the purported Wyndham Lewis is vastly more important than he had originally thought. Meanwhile, with Piers Hargreaves's ambitious presence threatening the Art Fund, Tim's job security seems precarious. Even his marriage suffers - as he tracks his most perplexing criminal yet.

Genres: Mystery

199 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1997

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

John Malcolm is the pseudonymn of John Malcolm Andrews, who lives in the south of England. He is an English author on antiques, journalist and crime writer, engineering businessman and author – as John Malcolm – of the Tim Simpson series of art crime novels and as John Andrews of the first Price Guide to Antique Furniture (1968) and Managing Editor of Antique Collecting magazine

Most of his novels feature Tim Simpson, art investment specialist, and the series began with 'A Back Room in Somers Town' in 1984. '

Born in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester, he is the son of May (née Whiteley) and Ernest Andrews, an engineer, His education was at Sale High School in Manchester and The British Schools of Montevideo (1946–1950), he returned to to England as a boarder at Bedford Modern School (1950–1955), and then attended St. John's College, Cambridge, where he read Engineering and was Captain of the Lady Margaret Boat Club. He graduated MA in 1958. Andrews worked as design engineer (1958–63), an export sales manager (1963–70), management consultant (1970–76), and international marketing manager (1976–90) before setting up his own business as a machinery broker in 1990,

In 1966 he was a founding member of the Antique Collectors' Club and published its first book under the name of John Andrews with The Price Guide to Antique Furniture (1968). He went on to write more books on antique furniture and is currently Managing Editor of Antique Collecting magazine.] He was Chairman of the Trustees of Rye Art Gallery from 1995 to 2004.

He published his first crime novel in 1984. He was Chairman of the Crime Writers' Association from 1994–5 and wrote a number of short stories.

Andrews is a member of the Crime Writers Association and the Society of Authors. He married Geraldine Lacey (a picture restorer) on 25 March 1961. The couple live in East Sussex and have one son.

Reviews

[Padgett Ratings · Rating 4 out of 5]

The world Malcolm creates is interesting and extremely inventive.

[Ralph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Art and money and greed and crime and murder...they all seem to go together fairly well in the mind, each word suggesting the next. Author John Malcolm swirls them all into the life of Time Simpson, an art buyer/merchant banker ("investment banker" in the States), and makes them combine into an excellent story told from Simpson's point of view. Set in the fiscally tough 1990s, the novel is ostensibly about the search for a lost Wyndham Lewis painting for the White Art Fund (a collection of paintings bought for investment purposes), but it's also about the machinations in the boardroom and behind the the scenes, the gutting of several businesses and the possible forced sale of the Art Fund. You don't have to know anything about either Wyndham Lewis or the Art Movement known as Vorticism to appreciate the story told by Simpson, but it would be almost criminal to not find out at least something about them in this age when Google can almost instantly give anyone enough knowledge to be dangerous. And knowing something about the man and his art might help you to evaluate more critically the opinions expressed in the book by Simpson and other characters; if nothing else, when they view a canvas, your mind's eye won't be looking at a tabula rasa. The setting is London, for the most part, with occasional excursions into nearby villages, and the narrator is an intelligent upper class Brit with a knack for observation and evaluation.