The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece
Edward Dolnick, 2005
HarperCollins
270 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060531188
Summary
In the predawn hours of a gloomy February day in 1994, two thieves entered the National Gallery in Oslo and made off with one of the world's most famous paintings, Edvard Munch's "The Scream."
It was a brazen crime committed while the whole world was watching the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. Baffled and humiliated, the Norwegian police turned to the one man they believed could help: a half English, half American undercover cop named Charley Hill, the world's greatest art detective.
The Rescue Artist is a rollicking narrative that carries readers deep inside the art underworld — and introduces them to a large and colorful cast of titled aristocrats, intrepid investigators, and thick-necked thugs. But most compelling of all is Charley Hill himself, a complicated mix of brilliance, foolhardiness, and charm whose hunt for a purloined treasure would either cap an illustrious career or be the fiasco that would haunt him forever. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—Marblehead, Massachusetts, USA
• Awards—Edgar Award
• Currently—lives in the Washington, DC area
Edward Dolnick is an American writer, formerly a science writer at the Boston Globe. He has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, New York Times Magazine, and Washington Post, among other publications.
His books include Madness on the Couch: Blaming the Victim in the Heyday of Psychoanalysis (1998) and Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell's 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon (2001).
Dolnick's book The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece (2005)—an account of the 1994 theft, and eventual recovery, of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" from Norway's National Gallery in Oslo—won the 2006 Edgar Award in the Best Crime Fact category.
The Forger's Spell (2008), describes the 1930-40s forging of Johannes Vermeer paintings by a critic-detesting Dutch artist, accepted as "masterpieces" by art experts until the artist's confession and trial in 1945.
Dolnick lives in the Washington, D.C. area, is married, and has two children. His wife, Lynn Iphigene Golden, is a member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family, publishers of the New York Times, and is on the board of The New York Times Company. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
The little-known world of art theft is compellingly portrayed in Dolnick's account of the 1994 theft and recovery of Edvard Munch's iconic painting "The Scream." The theft was carried out with almost comical ease at Norway's National Gallery in Oslo on the very morning that the Winter Olympics began in that city. Despite the low-tech nature of the crime, the local police were baffled, and Dolnick (Down the Great Unknown; Madness on the Couch) makes a convincing case that the fortunate resolution of the investigation was almost exclusively due to the expertise, ingenuity and daring of the "rescue artist" of the title: Charley Hill, a Scotland Yard undercover officer and former Fulbright scholar who has made recovering stolen art treasures his life's work. Hill is a larger-than-life figure who seems lifted from the pages of Elmore Leonard, although his adversaries in this inquiry are fairly pedestrian. While the path to the painting's retrieval is relatively straightforward once some shady characters put the word out that they can get their hands on it, the narrative's frequent detours to other crimes and engaging escapades from Hill's past elevate this work above last year's similar The Irish Game by Matthew Hart.
Publishers Weekly
The theft of, search for and recovery of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" (the first time). Dolnick (Down the Great Unknown, 2001, etc.), former chief science writer for the Boston Globe, offers a treatise on art theft using as his take-off point the remarkably easy 1994 pilfering of Munch's masterpiece from Norway's National Gallery. The protagonist is an Anglo-American detective for Scotland Yard, Charlie Hill, a Brit of a certain independent type, with scant regard for petty regulations that get in the way of practicality. But Hill's genuine love of the art he pursues personalizes both his search and the book itself. The chase is something of a game for Hill, just as it is to a certain extent for the thieves. Dolnick's narrative, in fact, is frequently interrupted with digressions on famous art thieves, previous art thefts (particularly the 1990 job at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum) and short vignettes, among them Charlie Hill's war stories from Vietnam. Readers will discover the ridiculousness of the popular image of a reclusive collector who has paid thieves to steal art for his own personal and private enjoyment. Thieves steal art not for any such reason as that but because it's valuable and relatively unguarded, even in museums. They steal art because it's there. The various digressions slow the pace a little as we wait for Dolnick to get back to the story of "The Scream," which needs no embellishment in its extraordinary twists, screw-ups, coincidences, and quick thinking on the part of Hill and his team of experienced undercover cops. In the end, we're left with the impression that they recovered the painting in spite of the Norwegian police rather than because of them. Sadly, Dolnick makes it clear why another version of "The Scream," and also Munch's "Madonna," could be pinched from Oslo's Munch Museum so easily a year ago-and why both are still at large. Overall, a picaresque tale.
Kirkus Reviews
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