The Rescue Artist

About the book

Meeting Mr. Hill

THE FIRST DETECTIVE I EVER MET outside a book was Charley Hill. I didn’t have any idea what to expect, but I didn’t expect much. Nor did Charley, as he made clear at once. He didn’t have a lot of time, he said, by way of introduction. How long did this “goddamned blind date” figure to take?

We’d met as a favor to a mutual friend. When Charley was sixteen, nearly forty years before, he’d shown up at a Washington, D.C., high school limping and battered from a rock climbing accident in the Rockies. One of his classmates, starstruck by the exotic new kid, had befriended him. Four decades later they were still the best of friends, though one had become a cop and the other a top-tier, top-priced lawyer.

“I’d never written about art. Charley, curiously, seemed to find that not off-putting, but appealing.”

The lawyer and I were neighbors in Washington. He knew my books and that I’d just finished one. Now he had an idea for me.

I muttered something noncommital. Every writer hears a dozen story ideas a week. Casual acquaintances will grab you at the grocery store. “You should write something about my wife’s brother. Guy’s a genius.” I needed something better, stranger, and more engaging than that.

“Cut it out,” my friend said. “This is for real.”

Within a few months Charley Hill happened to be passing through Washington. He’s lived in London for decades now but keeps up with American friends with whom he goes back as far as grade school. We met in the borrowed home of one of these old pals. Charley arrived empty-handed; I came weighed down with books I’d written, magazine articles, and even a yellowed newspaper clipping or two. I’d never written about art. Charley, curiously, seemed to find that not off-putting, but appealing.

He only explained his reasoning a year or two later. First of all, a lack of art credentials was no drawback. The art world was full of crooks and creeps. If anybody was going to get it right it would be an outsider. My first book, a critique of Freud called Madness on the Couch, was on psychology. Charley read it delightedly; what better preparation could a writer have for a venture into a world of self-delusion and colossal egos? Down the Great Unknown, my next book and an account of the first expedition through the Grand Canyon, suited him even better. The hero ofthat true tale was a one-armed Civil War veteran named John Wesley Powell, a vain, brave explorer who succeeded in an adventure he had no business even considering. Hill, a swashbuckler himself, found a soul mate.

Art was less of a stretch for me than it sounded. Though I’d never written about art, I had grown up in an art-saturated home. In my parents’ house near Boston no objects were as important as paintings; no people were as revered as artists. My mother, an art school graduate and a talented painter and sculptor, was seldom without a brush or a chisel in her hand. I’d been dragged through countless museums as a kid; maybe a little had sunk in. Many of those excursions had ended up at one of the most alluring of all such institutions: Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

“When thieves struck the Gardner in 1990… I knew at once that I wanted to write about it.”

When thieves struck the Gardner in 1990— a serene little gem of a museum suddenly became the site of the biggest art theft ever— I knew at once that I wanted to write about it.

The problem was that the books I like best tell a story. Many fine books are essentially long essays, but I wanted something with a beginning, middle, and end. The Gardner story had a superb beginning—a knock on the museum door in the middle of the night, thieves disguised as policemen, a Rembrandt, a Vermeer, and other treasures snatched from the Gardner’s walls—but then … nothing.

“Challenged, Charley relaxed a bit. ‘Who can’t stand me?’ He pondered the question and rattled off a list of names.”

How do you tell a story that ends almost as soon as it begins? Stymied by the Gardner story, I put art crime on a back burner and turned to other things.

About a decade would pass before I met Charley Hill. It quickly became clear that the story of The Scream had several of the elements I needed—a world-famous painting, first of all. Nobody would care much about a hunt for a painting they had never heard of. Second, the Scream saga began with a bold break-in, moved on to a satisfying tangle of loose ends and false leads, and ended with a confrontation in an empty house. If that wouldn’t do as beginning, middle, and end, then nothing would.

That left one obstacle, but it was a daunting one. The first editor I ever met had explained to me years before that for every writer considering a new book one question was key. The magic question: “Who do we root for?”

Every story needs a character at its core, and the richer and more complicated, the better. When I met with Charley, my mission was to sort out whether he had enough meat on his bones to carry a book. We sized each other up warily. We weren’t much alike, but that wasn’t a problem. I didn’t need a new friend, and Charley took for granted from long experience that almost no one was much like him. He told war stories about old cases and I asked rude questions—Who doesn’t like you? Whom can I call who’ll tell me you’re a bag of wind?

Challenged, Charley relaxed a bit. “Who can’t stand me?” He pondered the question and rattled off a list of names. The war stories hadn’t really engaged him; he’d told them clearly but without animation. (I would learn to recognize these rote performances. In Charley’s grumpy view, the world is full of ignoramuses and he has better things to do than explain the ABCs to them.)

But thinking about old friends and enemies, or friends turned enemies and vice versa, cheered Charley up. I liked that orneriness. I began to think that maybe this gruff, scholarly cop would prove a satisfactorily complex character. I cheered up too.

Travails with Charley: Edward Dolnick on Frequently Asked Questions

THE FUN IN WORKING on The Rescue Artist was that art crime brought such different worlds into collision. Those collisions didn’t stop after the book had been published. I gave a talk about the book at Harvard’s Sackler Museum. As I made my way out afterward, weaving past the professors and art curators in their academic tweeds, someone whispered— or growled—at me, “Give my best to Chollie.”

“A hulking figure grinned down at me like an Easter Island statue come to life. ‘Who are you?’ I asked.”

I looked around. A hulking figure grinned down at me like an Easter Island statue come to life. “Who are you?” I asked.

“I’m Rocky.”

Rocky was one of Charley Hill’s Art Squad colleagues, a legendary wild man and a much admired, much feared undercover cop. He tended to play crooks, convincingly. We’d never met. Rocky’s fellow cops loved telling stories about him, but even in mid-anecdote they’d hesitate and peer around the room as if making sure that the man himself would not appear and grab them in a headlock. The odds that anyone at the Sackler mistook Rocky for an art historian were pretty low.

When I give talks about The Rescue Artist, surprises like Rocky’s visit are rare. I do know I can count on being asked several questions.

What was it like working with Charley Hill?

It wasn’t dull. “Your other books,” Charley said at our first meeting, “are about dead people. I guess it’s harder when you write about people who are still alive.” Good point. To write a book about someone you don’t know is to take a long journey with a stranger in a small and overheated car.

By and large Charley was a good traveling companion. But I got on his nerves when I kept circling back to material we’d already covered a dozen times in search of ever more detail. “Was it your car or a rented car? What were you wearing? But was the suit old or one you’d bought for that role? I thought you said you were wearing a bow tie?”

Charley has a terrific memory. But the incessant questioning, like a mosquito’s whine, drove him wild. He wanted to make sure I saw the big picture—it’s not like Hollywood—and I kept nattering on about bow ties.

If we were together and I’d kept after him too long, Charley would retreat into glowering silence. This wasn’t good. We were based on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and when one of us had crossed the ocean, we had no time to waste. During the long stretches between visits we communicated almost exclusively by e-mail. I never knew what to expect. Charley might vanish for weeks at a time, or he might respond with half a sentence to a question I had hoped would keep us busy for a month.

“To write a book about someone you don’t know is to take a long journey with a stranger in a small and overheated car.”

Q: Tell me about your first art case.

A: A complete and utter cock-up.

On the other hand, he was more than capable of delivering long, detailed, out-of-the-blue answers to questions I’d given up on months before. The unpredictability of the whole process could drive you mad. Charley and I were slumped in his living room one evening, worn out and half-watching the news, when a story about problems in the London underground came on. The reporter did her stand-up near a station entrance. “That’s around the corner from where Grant-McVicar did the Picasso job,” Charley muttered.

The name of the crook, the very fact that there had been a Picasso stolen in downtown London, and Charley’s intimate knowledge of all the players in the case were all news to me. “Charley, when there are stories like this lying around, feig stories, you’ve got to let me know!” “Right. Yeah. Do you see where the damned remote has got to?”

“‘Charley, when there are stories like this lying around, big stories, you’ve got to let me know!’ ‘Right. Yeah. Do you see where the damned remote has got to?’”

Did Charley edit what you wrote?

No. Almost the first thing I did in my initial conversation with Charley was lay out ground rules. We were not coauthors; I’d write the book and give it to him to read before it was published as a courtesy. At that point he’d be free to make all the comments he wanted— factual, stylistic, grammatical. I promised I’d listen carefully to his suggestions, especially if he thought I’d made a factual error, but I didn’t promise to do more than listen. I emphasized there was always the risk that as I got deeply into the reporting I’d decide he was bad news, in which case I’d go ahead and write that. Finally, we agreed in that first conversation that Charley would have no share in money made from the book.

We never quarreled over any of those rules. When the time came, Charley read the book and marked it up. He resisted the impulse to suggest changes in things he found merely irritating; the few revisions he fought for had mostly to do with keeping secret identities secret or with softening criticisms he had directed at various rivals.

What did Charley think of the book?

He liked it, generally, although he didn’t like the way I’d characterized him—he felt I’d exaggerated the risks he ran and underplayed his love of art. His mother thought there was too much swearing. Despite his complaints about the book, its mere existence was a kick—not everyone has a book written about him. Charley handed out copies to the postman and the babysitter and the woman who cuts his hair. Characteristically, and to the utter dismay of business-minded friends who fret over his financial stability, he neglected to pass along copies to the art collecting lords and ladies of his acquaintance or to anyone else in a position to hire him.

I admired tremendously the way Charley responded to reading about himself. It’s seldom fun to see oneself through someone else’s eyes, but beyond a snarl or two Charley barely lobbied for changes in how he was portrayed. On the contrary. We got together late one night after I’d spent the day talking with some of his nonadmirers at Scotland Yard. Charley asked what I’d been up to. I told him where I’d been. He laughed.

“Well, Ed,” he said, “as Cromwell said to Peter Lely, ‘Paint it warts and all.’ “Both the thought itself and the footnote to the little-remembered Lely were pure Charley Hill.

“[Charley’s] mother thought there was too much swearing in the book.”

What’s next?

The next book deals with art crime again, but this time with art forgery rather than art theft. The book tells a true story, with a cast ranging from Johannes Vermeer to Hermann Goering. The story begins in Holland in the 1600s, skips ahead to the French Riviera in the 1930s and Occupied Holland in the 1940s, and culminates in a trial for treason in a Dutch courtroom lined with forged—or are they authentic?—Vermeers.