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. 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.
Painters, scientists, revolutionaries, poets-all were there.
Part fast-paced thriller and part social history, The Crimes of Paris is a book you cant put down. Synopsis Turn-of-the-century Paris was the beating heart of a rapidly changing world. The Official Website of Dorothy & Thomas Hoobler. The authors locate the French obsession with the painting's disappearance in a general fascination with crime, from the fictional thief Ars ne 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. The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection View larger image. They juxtapose a host of seedy characters against a Who’s Who of European modernism. 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. Co-authors Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler (Seven Paths to Death, 2008, etc.) spotlight the City of Light’s darker elements, from public perversions and private infidelities to thievery, rape and murder. 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.
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