Books in Canada
Strangely, while I wasn’t looking all that much forward to reading Balter’s book over the holiday season, I was really looking forward to devouring The Irish Game: A True History of Crime and Art by the UK journalist Matthew Hart. Like most of my acquaintances, I take a head-shaking, perverse fascination in art heists and the effrontery of the crooks so bold as to take objects which, by their nature, belong to all of us. Certainly the 1986 theft of masterpieces worth millions of dollars from Russborough House near Dublin in Ireland was a news story around the planet, and it is this theft with which Hart begins his account of how pictures are stolen, and by whom, and for whom. Despite much evidence to the contrary, there is a common belief that the stealing of masterworks is done at the behest of a reclusive millionaire who keeps the contraband in some sanctum sanctorum where he alone (for it is always a he) can salivate over its aesthetic merits and delights. The reality is rather different, and, while more plebian, is also more sordid, for pieces of art have become the security deposits for major drug dealers who don’t know a Rembrandt from a Rockwell. Matthew Hart describes some of these international machinations, but the main focus of his book is on a gang of thugs and lowlifes from the Dublin underworld. This is unfortunate because these thugs are not very compelling in themselves, nor are the shenanigans of the petty world they inhabit. I would have preferred more accounts of, and insight into, other major art thefts, although I should note that Hart does include a discussion of the first theft of Munch’s “The Scream” in Oslo, and ruminations on the still-unsolved theft of a Vermeer and a Titian from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Alas, the book’s keenest weakness is the writing. Oh, the verbs follow the nouns alright and the object follows the predicate, but the text tries too hard for a hard-edged, tough-guy, down-these-mean streets tone. This might have worked had Ross MacDonald or Raymond Chandler penned the book-and were we as readers still living in the middle of the last century. But Hart is no Chandler, and the film-noir tenor grows irksome quickly. Still, the book is worth reaching for because there are few competitors in the field, and, despite its literary failings, it is informative within a small compass about how small minds steal great art.
Greg Gatenby (Books in Canada)
From Publishers Weekly
In this engaging account of how stolen paintings have become collateral in the international drug trade, starting with the 1974 theft of a priceless Vermeer from an Irish estate, British author Hart (
Diamond: A Journey to the Heart of an Obsession) offers a convincing revisionist view of the closest thing the book has to a protagonist, legendary Irish thug Martin Cahill (aka "The General"). The case that the "slovenly, loyal, suspicious, immovable" Cahill was no mastermind, however, tends to render the narrative more prosaic than dramatic, as does the argument that most heists, including the sensational 1990 robbery from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the 1994 theft of Edvard Munch's
The Scream, involved more chutzpah and embarrassing security lapses than
Topkapi-like planning. The author's primary strength lies in his character portraits-he describes one upper-class art thief as rooting around "in the issues of the day like someone picking through a bin for a hat that would fit." The dedicated Irish police who tracked these criminals and attempted numerous stings to recover the paintings deserve credit for their heroism, but they aren't particularly memorable. Still, Hart sheds light on a little-known area of modern crime that should be of interest to many general readers.
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