I don’t usually read cozy-crime. To be honest, I’m usually allergic to it. But No Oil Painting is a jolly cozy-crime that lives up to its promise of odd-ball fun.
Genevieve Marenghi takes her personal experience at a National Trust house and weaves an engaging tale of eccentric volunteers and tempting artefacts. So I’ve invited her to share the intriguing story of how a radio interview sparked her reverse heist.
Genevieve Marenghi
GM: I’ve always been fascinated by art theft. Whenever I visit a museum or stately home, I fantasise about which piece I would steal and how. So naturally, when I heard an art detective being interviewed on the radio, my ears pricked right up.
Ex-Met, this private detective had been negotiating the return of a famous Titian, Rest on the Flight into Egypt (c.1508). It had been stolen years before from the the Marquess of Bath. In 2002, after liaising with a murky middleman – who had absolutely nothing to do with the original theft, honest, Your Honour – it was dumped at a bus stop outside Richmond Station. In a chequered, plastic holdall!
I go through Richmond station all the time, and I couldn’t shake the bizarre image of everyone rushing past this multimillion-pound masterpiece. I remember thinking what a great ending to a story that would make. And so the seeds of a reverse art heist were planted.
Reverse art heist
After nursing my terminally ill mother, I developed M.E. and had to resign from the Weekend FT, where I’d worked for eleven years. Sometime later, I became a volunteer at National Trust property, Ham House – a Jacobean jewel on the Thames in southwest London.
(For the uninitiated, I urge you to visit, but you’re legally obliged to read No Oil Painting first.)
When I first started out as a guide, some friends teased me about volunteering with a bunch of ‘boring’ pensioners, but these written-off senior citizens were by far the most interesting people that I’d ever worked with. Shrewd, funny and resilient, they were passionate about visitors enjoying Ham House.
There is something magical about this magnificent, brown-bricked mansion and I’d been toying with writing a historical novel set there. I was particularly enthralled by its former seventeenth-century resident, the formidable Duchess of Lauderdale.
She’d played both sides in the Civil War, and it was largely down to her courage and wits that Ham House remains intact today. She is said to haunt her former childhood home, but although I’ve led many an evening ghost tour, I’ve never once glimpsed her black-robed figure descend the Great Staircase. Much to my disappointment.
The radio interview inspired a change of tack. Why not write a contemporary novel set there? Brimful of stunning art, where better to set a reverse art heist?
Invisible from fifty
In hindsight, it also occurred to me that no present-day fiction had been set at a National Trust property, which is mad considering that it’s a huge British institution with five million members. Thus, my love for this hidden gem, together with the volunteers’ indomitable spirit, hatched Maureen, my wily septuagenarian art thief. (I even weaved in a key role for the Duchess.)
Most women become invisible from the age of fifty, but Maureen flips this into a superpower allowing her to hide in plain sight.
Grief, loneliness and boredom provide powerful motivation for Maureen’s cunning yet unhinged plan to steal her favourite painting.
I also injected darkness and past trauma into her backstory to lend plausibility to her eve-of-life crisis. Regardless, the comedy that I enjoy best is always entwined with darkness.
Snitches get stitches
Some of Maureen’s fellow guides rumble her theft of an obscure Dutch Golden Age master. But snitches get stitches, camaraderie wins out and they decide to help.
The unlikely gang find themselves in increasingly absurd situations, as they try to return it without being caught. I had so much fun creating this motley crew and my seemingly innocuous anti-hero.
“Mind you Maureen, you’re the very last person I’d suspect of masterminding a fine art heist,” one of her fellow guides tells her in the prologue, after she asks what they’d nick from Ham House in the event of a fire.
This daft pub game was actually initiated IRL by yours truly. The game I mean, not any fire or theft… Now I had both the beginning and the end to my heist novel. (Not that it culminates now outside Richmond station.)
The delicious puzzle was unravelling Maureen’s route from A to B:
“But Maureen muted the chorus of cheers. She didn’t respond to Rhona’s mutter that it was still November for crying out loud. Nor did she register Sanjay’s mock bow. Picturing instead a Jacobean stately home just over a mile away, where shutters were being closed and bolted, then lights extinguished, until the House was cloaked in near darkness. Save one second-floor window, which glowed in latticed squares as the sun dipped behind the cobbled West Courtyard.”
No Oil Painting is available in paperback/Kindle:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/No-Oil-Painting-Genevieve-Marenghi/dp/1917224125/
genevievemarenghi.com
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