I am finally vertical instead of horizontal and can sit down for about ten minutes or so now before having to get up and move around, but this back spasm is taking some time to shift and I spent most of yesterday feeling very sorry for myself. In those circs reading anything that requires any intellectual effort at all was out of the question, so I turned to a book I have had sitting on my heap for some time, The Good Thief's Guide to Paris by Chris Ewan.
I had read and reviewed his debut novel, The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam a couple of years ago, here, and enjoyed it very much. It had won the Long Barn Book's First Novel Award and I am delighted to find that this second book is as enjoyable as the first.
Charlie Howard is a thief and now an author:
"The critics who had read Amsterdam hailed it as a brilliant conceit, not only was the author of a series of pulp novels about a career thief pretending to be a thief in real life, he was also pretending to have written a book about his exploits. Only one problem: it wasn't pretend"
After a book reading in Paris, Charlie agrees to show a novice how to break into an apartment on the Marais. Twenty four hours later, Charlie's fence hires him to steal an oil painting - from the same address. When he gets there the painting is already gone and on returning to his own apartment, he discovers a dead body awaiting him - the owner of the painting. And so off we go....
I am going to make no attempt to explain the plot or what happens because I am not sure I am able to do so and it is full of twists and turns, bluff and double bluff, forged paintings that may or may not be the original after all, an art heist at the Pompidou, the mysterious Mr Farmer who is watching Charlie all the time and has pull and influence with the police and the government etc etc etc and other Parisian characters smoking Gauloise and knocking back espresso and talking elliptically through clouds of cigarette smoke. At one stage I had to put the book down to see if I could work out what was going on and could not. I remember saying exactly the same thing about The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam, and you need to keep your wits about you or else you will be lost.
I found this to be a very engaging novel, wittily written, full of humour and the hero, if he can be called such, Charlie likeable and attractive. Way back in the 1960s when a mystery like this was published, it used to be called a 'caper' novel (on reading my review of Amsterdam, I see I made the same observation. I am nothing if not original) and this is precisely what it is, full of fun and zapping along at a great pace.
Charlie was slung out of Amsterdam, now the French police have told him that Paris is not a good place for him to be as well, so he is now off to pastures new. I have heard rumours that he may surface in New York and if he does, then I shall be there waiting.
Great fun and guaranteed to lift the spirits.
