Wednesday, April 15, 2009

"A load of hooey"

Noah Charney reviews The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection: "While the account of the [1911] theft and recovery of the Mona Lisa is accurate and reasonably well-written, the supposed true crime conspiracy that the authors have uncovered and present in their work ... is a load of hooey. The sole source of this conspiracy, a 1932 article in The Saturday Evening Post by American journalist Karl Decker, was dismissed decades ago by all scholars worthy of the name as a wholesale invention—and one so outrageous that it is difficult to understand how anyone could believe it to be true."