In an interview on Art Crime

Your final choice is Ben Macintyre’s The Napoleon of Crime. Is what you admire about it its popular treatment of the subject – looking at crime through the character of the perpetrator?

I think Macintyre is particularly good at taking very thorough scholarship and translating it into an entertaining story, so that, without realising it, you’re learning about real historical facts. His books are scrupulous in the accuracy of their detail but reading them is like eating a bar of candy. The Napoleon of Crime was the first of his books that I read. To be fair, it’s not really about art crime. It’s about a person called Adam Worth who, after Al Capone, is probably the most famous criminal in history. The term ‘the Napoleon of crime’ was coined to describe him, and he was the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis Moriarty. He began as a homeless pickpocket in New York and he worked his way up to running his own organised crime syndicate in London. He stole one painting – Thomas Gainsborough’s portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, which at the time, in 1876, was the most expensive and most famous painting in the world. And he stole it ostensibly in order to blackmail the owner, Thomas Agnew of the Agnew Gallery, into paying the bail for his criminally inept younger brother John so that Adam, who was living under an assumed identity, would not have to risk revealing his identity by paying the bail himself. But then something that he could never have anticipated happened. The lawyer he’d hired to defend his brother actually won the case and his brother was freed – and now he had already stolen the most famous and most expensive painting in the world. He had no idea what to do with it. He wound up keeping it for 25 years.

Macintyre talks about why he might have kept the painting for so long. Apparently Georgiana looked exactly like Adam Worth’s girlfriend who ran off with his best friend. Perhaps he kept the painting because he couldn’t keep the woman that the painting reminded him of. In any event it was the first major art theft to make international headlines in the modern period. And it’s an interesting crime because it’s the kind of Victorian-era crime that inspired fictional creations like Raffles and Arsène Lupin. But the reality now is very different. Since World War II we’re no longer dealing with these charismatic, non-violent individual thieves, we’re dealing with organised crime groups. And although the theft of art might be exciting to read about, it is actually funding all manner of other more sinister crimes, like the drug and arms trade and even terrorism.

What’s next for you? Do you have another writing project underway?

Yes I do. I’ve been asked to write a sequel to my novel The Art Thief. And I’ve also been asked by a large academic press to write a definitive, but hopefully fun, textbook on art crime because one hasn’t really been written yet. So I’ll be alternating fiction and non-fiction.