Lem Devlin has had it with being surrounded by art that costs more than his entire life. Working for the Fine Artemis shipping and storage company, he doesn’t mind so much the value assigned to the beauty he sees every day. What bothers him is the casual consumerism that buys an extravagant work of art…
Heist novels are a staple of the genre but often they are few and far between. Robin Hood thieves have taken hold, and often when I read fictional criminals, they are less like Richard Stark’s Parker and Wallace Stroby’s Crissa Stone and more like a shadowy justice department where the important thing is to steal…
Willie Sutton famously said (or, perhaps, didn’t say) that he robbed banks because that’s where the money is. But that’s not the only place the money is. It’s in casinos too (thus, the Ocean’s [insert number] films). It’s sometimes in mobsters’ homes (the focus of Widows, for instance). But if you’re going to commit possibly…
In Tom Hunt’s One Fatal Mistake, eighteen-year-old Joshua Mayo kills a man in a terrible accident, but the tragedy quickly becomes a hit-and-run. Not reporting the accident to the police, Josh confides only in his mother—and then everything goes wrong. One Fatal Mistake is somewhat of a misnomer because it takes the reader deep inside…
PART I: THE HEIST At 3:20 a.m. on October 16, 2012, the Trigion Security control center dispatched two guards to investigate an alarm trip at the Kunsthal in Rotterdam’s Museumpark. While Trigion supplied onsite guards for the art museum’s visiting hours, after closing, the museum made do with visits by roving security patrols. By the…
For a movie that has accumulated such a high volume of accolades since its premiere, it’s a bit perplexing to find that Baby Driver is actually a bit of a difficult movie to review. Perhaps it’s because so much has been said about the film already, but the more likely reason is that the movie…
When I wrote an appreciation of Lionel White’s 1955 noir novel The Big Caper for my Lost Classics of Noir series on this site, I called White “the master of the heist (gone wrong) novel.” This new Stark House Press edition of two of White’s edgy crime stories helps back that claim. In The Snatchers…
In December 2002, two burglars broke into the Vincent van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. They didn’t use helicopters or lasers or any of the stuff art thieves use in the movies; they climbed a fifteen-foot ladder to the roof and got into the second floor (European first floor), where the main display halls are. They…
Gunshine State by Andrew Nette is a heist thriller set in Queensland, Melbourne and Thailand. Think Richard Stark’s Parker, Garry Disher’s Wyatt, and Wallace Stroby's Crissa Stone. Add a touch of Surfers Paradise sleaze and a very dangerous stopover in Asia. I have a lot of respect for writers who do heist thrillers. For one thing,…
Ah, the heist. Who hasn’t thought of it—maybe even dreamed about it—imagining both the daring nature of the action itself and the rich reward should it be successful? Turns out there are a lot of great heists, both in real life and in fiction, that have become the subject of some of the most memorable…
