The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection

"The 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa serves as the centerpiece for the Edgar Award — winning Hooblers' (In Darkness Death) unwieldy account of life and crime in belle poque Paris. But the Hooblers devote so much time to the history of detection, in both fiction and real life, that the prized painting's disappearance soon slips the reader's mind. The authors locate the French obsession with the painting's disappearance in a general fascination with crime, from the fictional thief Arsne Lupin, the hero of popular serials, to real 19th-century figures such as Vidocq, a former criminal turned investigator who inspired Poe — and Alphonse Bertillon, whose criminal identification system based on body measurements was a precursor to the science of biometrics. A lengthy look at the Parisian art scene is overly digressive, though Picasso and his pal Apollinaire's tenuous connection to the Mona Lisa theft provides one of the book's rare dramatic sections. When the painting is finally recovered in Florence in 1913, the reader is left as unsatisfied by the Hooblers' scattered history as by the Italian-born thief's dubious rationale for the theft. 16 pages of b&w photos." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

To Walter Pater, she was Leda and Saint Anne in one, "older than the rocks among which she sits — like the vampire, she has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave." George Sand vowed that "no one who has set eyes upon her for a moment can ever forget her." She obsessed Napoleon, who nicknamed her the Sphinx of the Occident. She piqued Oscar Wilde: The lady "becomes more wonderful... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) to us than (she) really is," he marveled, "and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, (she) knows nothing." She is a virgin, a whore, a muse, a witch, her creator in drag. And on August 21, 1911, a blazing Monday in Paris, she disappeared.

As detailed in R.A. Scotti's luminous new history, "Vanished Smile," Mona Lisa proved astonishingly easy to abduct. The woman known to her foster country as La Joconde — a nod both to her amused expression and to her surname, del Giocondo — was affixed by four iron hooks to the walls of the Louvre's Salon Carre and encased in a simple glass box, which investigators later found discarded and jumbled with her gilt frame at the foot of a nearby staircase. But if the heist of the world's most iconic portrait demanded little in the way of technical ingenuity, the motives of her captors remained inscrutable for years, as the metropolitan police braced themselves for a ransom demand that never came.

Meanwhile, Scotti writes, Mona Lisa "was nowhere in the Louvre, but she was everywhere else, smiling from kiosks, advertisements and magazine covers." Across the globe, "each development — and each disappointment — in the unfolding case made news."

Scotti narrates the investigation with gusto and grace, eliding its more fitful passages and smoothly negotiating its swerves and detours. As the dragnet snares two of Europe's most incandescent modernist luminaries — Pablo Picasso, the precocious Spaniard, and Guillaume Apollinaire, a "flamboyant poet and cultural provocateur" — "Vanished Smile" plunges into the vibrant Parisian art scene of 1905-11. Picasso and Apollinaire, renowned citywide as "the Wild Men of Paris," had befriended an impudent, imprudent young Frenchman who publicly boasted of plundering the Louvre's collection of Iberian statuary; their red-herring arrests signaled the uneasy rapport between high culture and the law.

Whether visiting Gertrude Stein's salon on the Rue de Fleurus or Leonardo's Florentine studio, this stylish volume exhales fragrant period detail. L'Apartment des Bains, the lavish bathroom where King Francois I had once displayed Lisa, "included a bathing pool, steam room, gambling room, and lounge, all elaborately frescoed" to deleterious effect: As Scotti observes, "Steam and oil paint do not mix well." The Seine in which Picasso and Apollinaire sought to drown some incriminating statuary "was dark, the lamplight picking out the ripples and undulations."

Ultimately, she implicates the mustachioed Marques de Valfierno, who enters the story in a swirl of cloak and a blast of stage fog. His involvement — indeed his very existence — seems "highly improbable," Scotti admits, but makes for "a fine, romantic tale" nonetheless.

This "stock character" reappears in another chronicle of the theft, "The Crimes of Paris," which likewise documents what one thief termed the "strange, almost voluptuous charm about stealing works of art." But Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler's engrossing forensic history casts a wider net. Their lively portraits include legendary mistress-about-town Marguerite "Meg" Steinheil, whose head was in President Felix Faure's lap when he abruptly died in 1899; Henriette Caillaux, the politician's wife who with connubial sangfroid executed the journalist responsible for smearing her spouse in print; and the Bonnot Gang, the original getaway-car bandits. Furled amidst these vignettes are disquisitions on bertillonage (the science of anatomical measurement for purposes of identification), 19th-century detective novels and the lethal chemistry of poisons.

The anecdotes buzz with energy; too bad that the Hooblers write such lackluster prose. "The Crimes of Paris" evokes a Belle Epoque in which singers "sing" and paintings are "done"; where Scotti's Paris radiates outward "in concentric circles like a snail shell," the Hooblers' is "a city of narrow, maze-like streets that were dark and dangerous, twisted alleys and dead ends where bodies were dumped." When a scientist inspects an exhumed corpse, "The skeleton told him a lot." What it lacks in style, however, "The Crimes of Paris" makes up for in breadth of research and depth of insight. The Hooblers argue that the cultural transgressions of modernist Paris — cubism, cabaret, crime fiction — found their evil counterparts in crime: murder, theft and political unrest.

After all, a mere eight months after Mona Lisa's return to the Louvre she was once again displaced, this time as the French government hurriedly relocated to Bordeaux after the German invasion. And there her smile — that maddening, depthless, immortal smirk — seemed no longer to stopper four centuries of secrets, but instead to greet, with rectitude and reserve, the bloody years ahead.

Daniel Mallory researches modernist literature at New College, Oxford.

Reviewed by Daniel Mallory, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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The New York-based writing duo has previously produced a chronicle of Mary Shelley's creation The Monster, and the 2005 Edgar Award novel In Darkness, Death. Here they recount the August 1911 theft of Leonardo de Vinci's Mona Lisa from the Louvre, and the investigation that ensued into some of the seamier parts of the French capital, where lifting a painting was one of the less spectacular crimes being committed. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

In 1911 Paris, Detective Alphonse Bertillon, renowned for pioneering crime-scene investigation techniques, is called upon to solve one of the most notorious crimes to hit the city: the theft of the "Mona Lisa" from the Louvre. The Hooblers present the true story of that case.