A missing artist sets a twisty mystery in motion

In Ellery Lloyd’s “The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby,” an art historian unravels the disappearance of a 1930s surrealist painter and her self-portrait. 

The newspapers of the 1930s did not recognize her as an artist. If they even mentioned Juliette Willoughby, they identified her as the daughter of a member of Parliament or perhaps a runaway heiress. To her patrician family, she was an embarrassment.

But Willoughby knew the power of her paintings. Her defiant stand, at odds with her aristocratic family, launches a tangled murder mystery that spans decades and continents. “The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby,” the latest novel by Ellery Lloyd, a nom de plume of the husband-and-wife team of Paul Vlitos and Collette Lyons, uncovers stories from the past that will upend the present. 

The book begins in present-day Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. Professor Caroline Cooper, an expert on the work of surrealist painter Juliette Willoughby, has been invited by gallery owner Patrick Lambert, who is Cooper’s ex-husband, to deliver a talk on Willoughby’s only known work, “Self-Portrait as Sphinx.” The talk is interrupted when uniformed men intrude and unexpectedly arrest Lambert for murder. 

The story abruptly shifts back in time to 1991, when Cooper and Lambert first meet as graduate students at Cambridge University. Both are pursuing studies of the surrealist movement and, for their dissertations, have been assigned the same academic adviser, Alice Long. When Long encourages Cooper to investigate Willoughby’s work, Lambert finds the suggestion to be ludicrous. Though Willoughby is an interesting footnote in art history, scholars contend that none of her paintings exist. Her self-portrait, the only piece to have ever been exhibited publicly, was lost in a 1937 apartment fire that killed the artist and her older, married lover. 

“Lots of things in the world are only lost because no one has bothered to look for them,” asserts Long.

Cooper accepts the challenge, which leads her to the Willoughby Bequest, an Egyptology collection housed in a museum at the university. Surprisingly, among the documents she discovers is Willoughby’s journal, which leads Cooper down a rabbit hole of family lore as she uncovers a history that many of the artist’s relatives want to keep buried. There can be consequences when one seeks to correct the record. 

The novel jumps between decades and voices, but the pieces come together in a satisfying mystery. 

Winding factual aspects of the surrealist art movement through a fictional story, the authors quietly but accurately illuminate how female painters have been marginalized throughout history, often expected to live in the shadows of more successful – but not necessarily more talented – male artists. One need look no further than the careers of Elaine de Kooning and Lee Krasner, brilliant painters of the abstract expressionist era who were also partners of more famous painters, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, respectively. 

In one chapter, Willoughby scans the shelves of a store, noting all the books written by men that focus on male artists, accounts that do not even mention the impact that female artists of the time might have had on their work. “This is how we get painted out of history,” she reflects.

As a teenager, Willoughby was committed to a mental hospital, an action her family took to control and discredit her. But painting allows her to take the reins of her life. 

“I promised if I was released, I would never say those things again,” she recalls. “What I never promised was that I would not draw or paint them.” 

The women – Willoughby, Cooper, and Long – emerge as the drivers of the story. They shine the light of truth on events, and art shows them the way.