I've been spending far too much time lately in the underworld of art forgery.

It began innocently enough. A few forged paintings. A notorious faker or two. Some authentication scandals. The usual sort of thing a perfectly respectable person reads about over morning coffee.

Then I discovered false provenances.

That was a mistake.

Because once you start reading about forged histories, questionable restorations, invented collectors, conveniently misplaced records, dubious experts, and paintings that somehow acquire entirely new identities somewhere between one owner and the next, you begin to realize something rather unsettling.

The forgery isn't always the most interesting part.

Sometimes it's everything built around it.

A convincing fake isn't simply a painting copied well enough to fool somebody. The really audacious ones come with histories. Names. Documents. Owners. Exhibitions. Stories.

Give an object the right story and people begin to see what they expect to see. That's where things get interesting.

Imagine a painting hanging on a wall for fifty years.

Experts admire it. Scholars write about it. Collectors envy it. Perhaps a museum places it beneath carefully controlled lighting while visitors stand respectfully in front of it and contemplate the genius of a dead master.

Then somebody discovers the wrong pigment.

Or a receipt dated three years before the supposed owner could possibly have bought it.

Or a photograph that shouldn't exist.

Or a signature beneath the signature.

Nothing about the painting has changed.

But everything about the painting has changed.

That idea has been following me around lately.

What makes something authentic?

Is it the object itself?

Its history?

The name attached to it?

Or simply the fact that enough people believe the same story?

And then there's the forger.

I'm becoming rather fond of these people—which is probably not something I should admit publicly.

The best of them aren't merely good painters. They're researchers, chemists, historians, actors, psychologists and storytellers. They don't just imitate an artist's brush.

They manufacture certainty.

And certainty, I'm discovering, can be a remarkably fragile thing.

All of this has led me into archaeology, museums, provenance records, historical documents, private collections and some decidedly murky corners of the art world.

Which brings me to the real reason I've been doing all this. There's another book taking shape on my desk. I'm not going to tell you much about it yet. Where would be the fun in that?

I will say that I've become increasingly interested in the thin line between preserving history and rewriting it—and in what might happen if someone became very, very good at moving that line.

I've also learned considerably more about forging historical objects than any law-abiding novelist probably needs to know. 

Fortunately, they're fictional.

For now.