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A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece
HarperCollins
July 2005
288 pages
ISBN: 0060531177
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
In the predawn
gloom of a February day in 1994, two thieves entered the
National
Gallery in Oslo. They snatched one of the world's most
famous
paintings, Edvard Munch's The Scream, and fled
with their $72
million trophy. The thieves made sure the world was
watching: the
Winter Olympics, in Lillehammer, began that same morning.
Baffled and
humiliated, the Norwegian police called on the world's
greatest art
detective, a half-English, half-American undercover cop
named Charley
Hill. In this rollicking narrative, Edward
Dolnick takes
us inside the art underworld. The trail leads high and low,
and the
cast ranges from titled aristocrats to thick-necked thugs.
Lord Bath,
resplendent in ponytail and velvet jacket, presides over a
9,000-acre
estate. David Duddin, a 300-pound fence who once tried to
sell a stolen
Rembrandt, spins exuberant tales of his misdeeds. We meet
Munch, too, a
haunted misfit who spends his evenings drinking in the
Black Piglet
Café and his nights feverishly trying to capture in paint
the visions
in his head. The most compelling character of all is
Charley Hill, an
ex-soldier, a would-be priest, and a complicated mix of
brilliance,
foolhardiness, and charm. The hunt for The Scream
will either cap his career and rescue one of the world's
best-known paintings or end in a fiasco that will dog him
forever.
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