KEY POINTS:
On February 2, 1994, a man rested a ladder against the sill of the second floor of Norway's National Gallery. Elsewhere in the building, a guard was too engaged in his paperwork to notice what was being captured on the closed circuit television screen in front of him. The thief climbed up the ladder, fell off it, tried again. This time he reached the top rung, smashed the window with a hammer and clambered inside.
The alarm went off, but the guard assumed it was a false one and simply switched it off. The intruder snipped the wire holding Munch's The Scream to the wall and slid the painting - at the time estimated to be worth $123 million - down the ladder to his accomplice. It was the day of the 1994 Winter Olympics, and one of the host country's most famous paintings had been stolen in less than a minute. All it had taken were two men and a ladder.
Enter Charlie Hill, a Scotland Yard undercover cop posing as Chris Roberts, a loud American from the Getty Museum prepared to negotiate with thieves on behalf of the Norwegians. The story is that if he got it back, Norway would be obliged to provide the Getty with an extended loan of the iconic painting.
Much of this book is about Hill, characterised as menacing, domineering, bad-tempered, restless, astute and well-read. A bully with a taste for literature, according to Dolnick. He was an obvious bet for the job, arriving with an impressive list of recovered paintings on his CV, including Vermeer's Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid and Bruegel's Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery.
As the book reveals, art crime is extremely common and surprisingly easy. Another version of The Scream (Munch painted four of them) was stolen from the Munch Museum in Oslo only a decade later. You'd think they might have learned. But that's nothing compared with Rembrandt's Jacob III de Heyn, which has been stolen, and recovered, four times.
While the recovery of The Scream drives the narrative, there are many diversions along the way: what motivates Hill; what motivates art criminals; what drives the art market; what drove Munch to such despair.
The problem is that the side stories, intended to bolster and elaborate on the main one, tend to take over. Structurally the book reads something like an extended feature article (the author used to be the chief science writer at the Boston Globe), and the journalistic tricks become more obvious, and more annoying, as the book goes on. Stealing the Scream is thoroughly researched, detailed, informative, surprising and very readable, but would have been twice the book at half the length.
-Icon Books, $39.99
* Margo White is an Auckland reviewer.
