Here are 100 books that Transnational Art Crime fans have personally recommended if you like
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Back in 2006, a New York Times Magazine feature article about me announced that I had essentially founded the field of the study of art crime, while still a postgraduate student. I’m often mentioned as the world’s leading authority on the history of art crime and I’ve been a professor teaching the subject for more than a decade (I’m not actually that old). I also founded ARCA, the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, the world’s first think tank and research group on art crime. We launched the first academic journal on the subject, The Journal of Art Crime, as well as the first academic study program, the ARCA Postgraduate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection, which runs every summer in Italy. I’m also the author of more than a dozen books, many best-sellers, and one a Pulitzer finalist. I write on art crime for TED Ed videos, I host TV programs on the subject, and I recently curated a virtual exhibit of lost art called Missing Masterpieces.
If you saw the recent film, The Duke, then you’ll know the story of Kempton Bunton and the crazy art heist from London’s National Gallery, when Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington was stolen. This is one of the most interesting and quirkiest of all art heists and this book is the definitive telling of it.
In 1961, a thief broke into the National Gallery in London and committed the most sensational art heist in British history. He stole the museum’s much prized painting, The Duke of Wellington by Francisco Goya. Despite unprecedented international attention and an unflagging investigation, the case was not solved for four years, and even then, only because the culprit came forward voluntarily.
Kempton Bunton, an elderly gentleman, claimed he executed the theft armed with only a toy gun, a disguise purchased for five shillings, and a getaway car inadvertently provided by a drunkard. Shortly after turning himself in, Bunton also invoked…
Back in 2006, a New York Times Magazine feature article about me announced that I had essentially founded the field of the study of art crime, while still a postgraduate student. I’m often mentioned as the world’s leading authority on the history of art crime and I’ve been a professor teaching the subject for more than a decade (I’m not actually that old). I also founded ARCA, the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, the world’s first think tank and research group on art crime. We launched the first academic journal on the subject, The Journal of Art Crime, as well as the first academic study program, the ARCA Postgraduate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection, which runs every summer in Italy. I’m also the author of more than a dozen books, many best-sellers, and one a Pulitzer finalist. I write on art crime for TED Ed videos, I host TV programs on the subject, and I recently curated a virtual exhibit of lost art called Missing Masterpieces.
David Gill is the leading authority on antiquities looting and the legitimate institutions that trade in it. This collection of essays, most published first in The Journal of Art Crime, is as good an introduction as any to the dark side of the antiquities trade.
Context Matters is a volume of essays on the illicit trade in antiquities, the ownership of cultural heritage and issues in archaeology. It is based on the twenty essays contributed to the Journal of Art Crime over its first ten years of publication. The contributions are supplemented by articles and review articles that were published alongside them. The chapters were written as museums in Europe and North America were facing a series of claims on recently acquired objects in their collections in the light of the photographic dossiers that had been seized from dealers in Switzerland and Greece. They engage…
Back in 2006, a New York Times Magazine feature article about me announced that I had essentially founded the field of the study of art crime, while still a postgraduate student. I’m often mentioned as the world’s leading authority on the history of art crime and I’ve been a professor teaching the subject for more than a decade (I’m not actually that old). I also founded ARCA, the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, the world’s first think tank and research group on art crime. We launched the first academic journal on the subject, The Journal of Art Crime, as well as the first academic study program, the ARCA Postgraduate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection, which runs every summer in Italy. I’m also the author of more than a dozen books, many best-sellers, and one a Pulitzer finalist. I write on art crime for TED Ed videos, I host TV programs on the subject, and I recently curated a virtual exhibit of lost art called Missing Masterpieces.
This book reads like a novel but tells the true story (one of the authors was personally involved in the adventures) of one of the most famous lost art collections of all-time. Over 400 paintings were once owned by Erich Slomovic, a Serbian Jewish collection based in Paris, who was killed in a concentration camp during the Second World War. Most of his collection remains lost, its whereabouts unknown. This book is unusually written in that it really feels like a Dickensian novel but it’s based on the best available scholarship and research.
There are countless stories of buried, hidden, lost and then “exhumed” artworks, preserved thanks to having been hidden. The Croatian Jew Erich Šlomovič possessed an art collection of around 600 paintings, including works by Picasso, Chagall and Matisse, which he acquired while working in Paris in his early twenties as the protégé of the art dealer Ambroise Vollard. When Šlomovič fled Paris in anticipation of the Nazi invasion, he placed 190 paintings in a bank vault, while the rest were boxed up and smuggled across Nazi-occupied territories with the assistance of the Yugoslav Embassy, eventually to be brought to Belgrade.…
Back in 2006, a New York Times Magazine feature article about me announced that I had essentially founded the field of the study of art crime, while still a postgraduate student. I’m often mentioned as the world’s leading authority on the history of art crime and I’ve been a professor teaching the subject for more than a decade (I’m not actually that old). I also founded ARCA, the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, the world’s first think tank and research group on art crime. We launched the first academic journal on the subject, The Journal of Art Crime, as well as the first academic study program, the ARCA Postgraduate Program in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection, which runs every summer in Italy. I’m also the author of more than a dozen books, many best-sellers, and one a Pulitzer finalist. I write on art crime for TED Ed videos, I host TV programs on the subject, and I recently curated a virtual exhibit of lost art called Missing Masterpieces.
This book is part philosophy, part on art and forgery. Most approaches, my own included, to art forgery are art historical and criminological. This one is readable and thoughtful and fun but focuses on the big ideas behind the scenes.
The obsession with art forgery appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon. In Art Forgery, the author's aim is not to suggest new methods of detection, but rather to look at the genealogy of faking and to interrogate the anxious, sometimes neurotic, reactions triggered in the modern world of art by these clever frauds. Thierry Lenain considers the idea of authenticity in the Middle Ages, when the issue of false relics and miracles often arose: if a relic gave rise to a cult, it would be considered as genuine even if it had evidently been 'forged'. Similarly, the seventeenth and…
I was raised by my Grandmother who escaped Nazi-occupied Germany. A strong, proud, capable woman who eventually, despite arriving in the UK as a refugee, ended up working for Winston Churchill as a war secretary. Not a feminist but rather a true champion of women. I believe a woman's body, her mind, her essence is her own! I write about strong females, sex positive not under the control of an Alpha male. I have a rare gift for writing Erotica with a real story, which will transport you as if in the room with my characters. More than this, I create characters you'll care about and take with you on your own journey path.
Believing in Fate by Veya Thorn is my first read into Mafia romance and the underworld of International crime. I was not expecting to love this book as much as I did, such a fantastic read. It’s full of danger, intrigue, chaos, charm, lust, more lusting, love, friendship, and family. Asimina, the MC is one of the reasons I loved the book. She’s independent, strong, brave, intelligent, feisty, and full of determination to succeed and survive on her own. She’s a beautiful woman who you don’t ever want to cross but you admire her courage. She’s someone you punch the air for and would wish to fight alongside. Ah, if only books were real life!!
It is said your fate is sealed at infancy, love, happiness, and sorrow. Asimina Alexiou is impulsive, brave, vibrant, and Independent. She finds herself with unwanted attention. She sought help from her cousin, a man that is nothing less than a brother. However, Petro has secrets of his own that will land Asimina in the hands of one Capo Dei Capi Raffaele Dante Morelli.Raffaele the crime boss of the biggest mafia family across the States and Europe. His close, inner cycle of men is his underboss and capos running extensive drug and gun operations throughout multiple sectors. Raffaele's training has…
My love of mysteries began with Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden. I moved on to Elizabeth Peters and Mary Stewart before discovering Agatha Christie and other Golden Age authors. My love of mysteries inspired me to try my hand at the genre, first with cozy mysteries then with historical mysteries. The 1920s is my favorite time period to read and write about. I’m fascinated by the way society was changing then, and I can’t resist an English country house murder. I’ve listed some of my favorite undiscovered mystery gems from the 1920s and hope you find them the bee’s knees!
Unlike so many
heroines of historical mysteries who had dangerous jobs in the Great
War—usually a spy, courier, or battlefield nurse—I found Iris Cooper
refreshingly average, but not boring. She’s sailing from England to America
after a round-the-world tour with her aunt. When a man dies in a deck chair,
Iris searches for answers about his identity. I especially liked the fact that
Iris used her shorthand and typing skills to become part of the ship-board
inquiry into the death and holds her own with the panel, which is basically an
old boy’s club. The parade of suspects is catnip for a mystery reader like me
and includes a voluptuous film star, a
mysterious professor studying criminology, a handsome musician, and an
enthusiastic newspaper reporter. I enjoyed watching Iris come into her own as a
sleuth and find a little romance along the way.
Near the end of her round-the-world cruise, young Iris Cooper is called upon by the ship's captain to assist him in his investigation of a murder committed by someone with a fondness for brass-handled ship's knives
I wrote on the mob early in my career as a newspaper reporter, investigating organized crime’s infiltration of politics, unions, and the toxic-waste industry in New Jersey in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, then covering some of the major mob trials in New York during the 1980s (starting with the case depicted in the movie Donnie Brasco). In more recent years, I’ve returned to the subject in two books: The Italian Squad: The True Story of the Immigrant Cops Who Fought the Rise of the Mafia and An Unlikely Union: The Love-Hate Story of New York’s Irish and Italians. I like work that is careful, specific, and presented in a smoothly written narrative.
This is another book that cuts through the hype, helping to define the often sensationalized connections between mafiosi in Italy and the United States.
Historian Salvatore Lupo, a Sicilian, brings a perspective often missing in American books on the Mafia. His meticulous research knocks down the idea that the American Mafia was ever some giant “alien conspiracy” with Sicilian overlords, but it does examine whatever interconnections and parallels exist in real life between the two Mafias.
Much like the Critchley book, this is for those who want the facts, facts, facts. And Italian experts have a lot to contribute to the story of the American Mafia.
A realistic understanding of the mafia must avoid depictions both of a monolithic organization and of localized, isolated groups. Here, renowned historian Salvatore Lupo analyzes the mafia as a network of varied relationships and institutions, the result of a complex cultural and social encounter that was shaped by multiple, diverse environments.
Over my two decades as a scholar of American foreign policy and international politics, I had multiple opportunities to serve as a Latin America foreign policy aide. Given that Latin America plays a central role in the U.S.-hatched modern war on drugs, much of my policymaking was directly or indirectly tied to drug policy. I thus wrote Drugs and Thugs above all to make sure that I had a good sense of the history of this seemingly eternal conflict, one that is “fought” as much at home as abroad.
Hari’s Chasing the Scream is not an exhaustively researched book but it still merits listing given how viscerally the author addresses the history of the global war on drugs in the light of his own personal addiction. Hari shines in his depiction of circa 1930s U.S. Drug Cop #1, Henry J. Anslinger, who, among other dubious endeavors, sought to throw the book at jazz singer Billie Holiday, who also happened to be a heroin addict.
What if everything you think you know about addiction is wrong? Johann Hari's journey into the heart of the war on drugs led him to ask this question--and to write the book that gave rise to his viral TED talk, viewed more than 62 million times, and inspired the feature film The United States vs. Billie Holiday and the documentary series The Fix.
One of Johann Hari's earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of his relatives and not being able to. As he grew older, he realized he had addiction in his…
I love history. I’ve loved it ever since I was a kid, listening to my dad’s history lectures. And in my history classes, I always tucked away stories about women. There weren’t many; most were trailblazers like Amelia Earhart or Susan B. Anthony. They were completely admirable, but I wanted to know about the women who had strayed from the straight and narrow: the murderers, the liars, and the thieves. Now, I write about women committing crimes throughout history. As a reader, I can never resist a story about a woman from the past doing things she shouldn’t. These books were endlessly entertaining and sometimes downright chilling to read.
Everyone knows who Lizzie Borden is, and everyone thinks they know whether or not she did it. But what few people know about is her trial. I have always been pretty obsessed with the Lizzie Borden story (hint: she’s totally guilty). But this book put a whole new spin on the country’s original true crime.
I loved reading about the legal proceedings that put Lizzie front and center of a violent crime (not a common place for a woman to be in Gilded Age America). It painted Lizzie in a more vulnerable light than the axe-wielding murderess I had always pictured her as. It also helped explain why she was acquitted.
In Cara Robertson’s “enthralling new book,” The Trial of Lizzie Borden, “the reader is to serve as judge and jury” (The New York Times). Based on twenty years of research and recently unearthed evidence, this true crime and legal history is the “definitive account to date of one of America’s most notorious and enduring murder mysteries” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
When Andrew and Abby Borden were brutally hacked to death in Fall River, Massachusetts, in August 1892, the arrest of the couple’s younger daughter Lizzie turned the case into international news and…
I am an award-winning true crime author, criminologist, and victims advocate who has written and presented on crime for over 30 years. I know that history teaches us how and why crime occurs and why it will happen again, but crime doesn't happen in a vacuum. History, personality, and human nature all play a part. There is always a "story behind the story." I appreciate true crime books that teach us rather than sensationalize. The faster we share knowledge, the easier it is to catch criminals.
Why are female criminals "ugly"? Italian criminologist Professor Caesar Lombroso discusses crime causation, justice systems, penology, and the female offender. Lombroso rallied for humane treatment of inmates, advocating programs to reform the penal system, and believed both generated a better society. He argued that criminal behavior is inherited and categorizing offenders as: crimes of passion, aka "lunatics", occasional offenders, and born criminals. He also tried to identify them by physical attributes: the skull, features, and tattooing.
Lombroso's atavistic theories initially seem outdated - and even laughable - but are still practiced today. "(S)he looks like a criminal" is something you commonly hear. Or, people instantly judge someone's tattoos. Lombroso's approach is still utilized in true crime media. The case becomes more interesting when perpetrators are attractive. Even the monikers for female criminals are modified: femme fatale, black widow, she-devil. Readers will enjoy the contrast/comparison to 1900s criminology. The Female Offender…
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