Heists are in the air. Paris is in a tizzy over recent smash and grabs at the Louvre and elsewhere. Stateside, Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, featuring the people’s boyfriend Josh O’Connor as a bumbling local art thief, is hitting theaters. I’m finding it hard not to root for the crooks, personally. There’s something satisfying about the victim-less crime. And as for settings? Museums can make the perfect backdrop. They’re mysterious, vast, and usually haunted.

If you’re also feeling heist-y this October, here are seven books to scratch those itchy palms.

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch 

Late fall may be the perfect time to return to this block-busting novel, which you’ll recall was toast of the town twelve years ago. When the young Theo Decker swipes a painting off the Met’s wall in the panicky aftermath of a public attack, he sets strange things in motion. This book’s interested in the power of objects. How can beautiful things save and destroy us?

María Gainza, Portrait of an Unknown Lady

I loved María Gainza’s autofictional Optic Nerve for its lush descriptions, and the bits of art history trivia. In this novel from the Argentinean art critic, we find another protagonist who’s obsessed with the image. But this time we’re in history, and foul play abounds. Following an art forger and the critic who’s hot on her trail, this novel considers why we crave authenticity from art.

Dubravka Ugrešić, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender

This is a sideways riff on the theme, not set in a literal museum. But any opportunity to sing the late Ugrešić’s praises, I will take. This strangely constructed palimpsest of a novel is itself a museum of sacred contraband. An exile tells the story of her statelessness in vignettes and reflections, centering on the objects that tie her to a place. A weird, excellent book that will make you reconsider what it means to own things.

Edogawa Rampo, The Black Lizard

Rampo was a prolific crime writer, known for his dark-hearted mysteries. The Black Lizard is him at peak noir. First published in 1934, the novel follows a recurring Rampo character, Detective Akechi Kogoro, who gets all tangled up with an exhibitionist jewel thief known only as the Dark Angel.

None other than Yukio Mishima adapted this high-octane heist into a successful play. Which was later adapted into a 60s farce. Just goes to show that jewel crime can keep paying. Sometimes for many, many years.

Chester Himes, The Essential Harlem Detectives

Himes came to mind because the author lived and loved in Paris, where he probably contemplated the Louvre while dreaming up certain crime thrillers. In Crimereads, Bruce Riordan called Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson, the subject/heroes of Himes’ Harlem quartet, the hardest of the hardboiled.

Across four gritty, witty books, Jones and Johnson encounter elaborate con men who are extra inventive about their heists. Both methods, and marks.

Peggy Guggenheim, Confessions of an Art Addict 

Okay, so, Ms. Guggenheim isn’t technically an art thief (by the most literal metric, anyway). But as a close chronicler of the art monsters of the 1930s and 40s, she is very, very fun company on the page. A devoted collector of early modern art, Guggenheim also pulled one over on the Louvre by investing in the Surrealists and the Cubists long before other curators found them fashionable.

Including this gossipy memoir for the truly obsessive aesthetes. Your Thomas Crowns, etc.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure Of The Blue Carbuncle

Finally, we return to a standard-bearer. The man who gave us Sherlock Holmes knows a lot about theft—artsy, or no. In this classic story, Holmes and Watson attempt to recover a stolen gem. A Christmas goose is a major plot point. And the action unfolds at an inn, catty corner to the British Museum. A perfect little mystery for the crook and crook-fighters that live in all of us.

I note this classic was tied with another: E.L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil-E. Frankweiler. But in my book, trespassing is barely a crime.

Wishing you the best with all your break-ins and boosts.

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