The Rescue Artist

EDWARD DOLNICK was born in 1952. “I grew up in a little town called Marblehead, on the ocean about twenty miles north of Boston,” he says. “The town was once home to fishermen and sailors. In the Revolutionary War these sailors turned soldiers had been notorious for their rowdy ways. One group of Marblehead fishermen started a snowball fight that grew into a riot, and it took George Washington himself to break it up. But by my day the small town was just another suburb. Dads wore suits and commuted to work; moms cooked dinner. Somehow I missed most of that. I was a dreamy kid fond of tales of derring-do, preferably in exotic and watery settings.”

Dolnick’s earliest memory of reading and then rereading a book concerns what he dubs “a kind of poor man’s Treasure Island.” That book, Jim Davis, traces the adventures of “a boy who runs off to sea with a gang of thieves and raiders,” says Dolnick. “The tale of smugglers and secret hideaways was perfect for a ten-year-old. Better yet, it actually belonged to my big sister. She had been assigned the book in school and rejected it immediately (‘Pirates!’). This was a hard to beat twofer—an adventure yarn that had been officially deemed suitable only for older readers.”

As a teenager Dolnick fell lastingly under the spell of Moby-Dick. “The strange and tangled language (‘a whale ship was my Yale College and my Harvard’) and the subversive message were meat and drink for a suburban dreamer marooned in the twentieth century,” he says. “My parents had chosen not to give my sister or me a middle name so that we could eventually pick our own. Now I was ready. Enthralled, and sixteen, I chose: Ishmael.”

‘My parents had chosen not to give my sister or me a middle name so that we could eventually pick our own. Now I was ready. Enthralled, and sixteen, I chose: Ishmael.’

A former chief science writer at the Boston Globe, Dolnick has written for the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, and many other publications. He is the author of Down the Great Unknown: John Wesley Powell’s 1869 Journey of Discovery and Tragedy Through the Grand Canyon.

Asked to share an anecdote about his days as a cub reporter, Dolnick very quickly unpacks the following: “On my very first day as a reporter they announced that year’s Nobel Prize winners. I was working in Boston, and by coincidence one of the winners for medicine happened to be in town giving a lecture. A veteran reporter knocked out a long, complicated story explaining the great man’s breakthrough. My job, I learned with dismay, was to write a ministory providing a glimpse of the winner’s human side. I squeaked out a question about hobbies. Then I retreated to my desk with a nugget of information—our man liked skiing—and labored over my prose. Hours passed. “His hobbies, which include skiing …” Delete. “Skiing, the pastime that…” Delete. Shifts ended; reporters came and went; editors glowered. Hours after deadline I handed over my opus in all its two-sentence glory.”

Asked to describe his writing habits, he opens the curtains on a scene of questionable charm. “I write at home,” he says, “in a cluttered office lined floor to ceiling with file drawers, each bearing a scrawled label (‘most expensive paintings,’ ‘recent thefts’) and bursting with clippings and articles. Closer at hand, concentric stacks of paper encircle my chair. The tallest piles, which contain the most consulted references, form the inner circle. A slightly lower ring is next, followed by another one or two rings in descending order. Lined up precariously near my computer keyboard sit half a dozen cups of tea, fetched and then forgotten at about half-hour intervals throughout the day.

“This sanctum,” he continues, “is off-limits to all visitors with the exceptions of two colossal 125-pound dogs named Blue and Lily. The pure white and immensely friendly Great Pyrenees dogs spend most of their days stretched out like bearskin rugs. At random intervals—when the FedEx man knocks on the door, when a squirrel dares to venture into view, or when an interview subject finally returns my call—they spring to life in a frenzy of barking, toppling stacks of carefully arranged papers in their glee.”

Dolnick has two grown sons and lives with his wife near Washington, D.C.

About the book

Meeting Mr. Hill

THE FIRST DETECTIVE I EVER MET outside a book was Charley Hill. I didn’t have any idea what to expect, but I didn’t expect much. Nor did Charley, as he made clear at once. He didn’t have a lot of time, he said, by way of introduction. How long did this “goddamned blind date” figure to take?

We’d met as a favor to a mutual friend. When Charley was sixteen, nearly forty years before, he’d shown up at a Washington, D.C., high school limping and battered from a rock climbing accident in the Rockies. One of his classmates, starstruck by the exotic new kid, had befriended him. Four decades later they were still the best of friends, though one had become a cop and the other a top-tier, top-priced lawyer.

“I’d never written about art. Charley, curiously, seemed to find that not off-putting, but appealing.”

The lawyer and I were neighbors in Washington. He knew my books and that I’d just finished one. Now he had an idea for me.

I muttered something noncommital. Every writer hears a dozen story ideas a week. Casual acquaintances will grab you at the grocery store. “You should write something about my wife’s brother. Guy’s a genius.” I needed something better, stranger, and more engaging than that.

“Cut it out,” my friend said. “This is for real.”

Within a few months Charley Hill happened to be passing through Washington. He’s lived in London for decades now but keeps up with American friends with whom he goes back as far as grade school. We met in the borrowed home of one of these old pals. Charley arrived empty-handed; I came weighed down with books I’d written, magazine articles, and even a yellowed newspaper clipping or two. I’d never written about art. Charley, curiously, seemed to find that not off-putting, but appealing.

He only explained his reasoning a year or two later. First of all, a lack of art credentials was no drawback. The art world was full of crooks and creeps. If anybody was going to get it right it would be an outsider. My first book, a critique of Freud called Madness on the Couch, was on psychology. Charley read it delightedly; what better preparation could a writer have for a venture into a world of self-delusion and colossal egos? Down the Great Unknown, my next book and an account of the first expedition through the Grand Canyon, suited him even better. The hero ofthat true tale was a one-armed Civil War veteran named John Wesley Powell, a vain, brave explorer who succeeded in an adventure he had no business even considering. Hill, a swashbuckler himself, found a soul mate.

Art was less of a stretch for me than it sounded. Though I’d never written about art, I had grown up in an art-saturated home. In my parents’ house near Boston no objects were as important as paintings; no people were as revered as artists. My mother, an art school graduate and a talented painter and sculptor, was seldom without a brush or a chisel in her hand. I’d been dragged through countless museums as a kid; maybe a little had sunk in. Many of those excursions had ended up at one of the most alluring of all such institutions: Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

“When thieves struck the Gardner in 1990… I knew at once that I wanted to write about it.”

When thieves struck the Gardner in 1990— a serene little gem of a museum suddenly became the site of the biggest art theft ever— I knew at once that I wanted to write about it.

The problem was that the books I like best tell a story. Many fine books are essentially long essays, but I wanted something with a beginning, middle, and end. The Gardner story had a superb beginning—a knock on the museum door in the middle of the night, thieves disguised as policemen, a Rembrandt, a Vermeer, and other treasures snatched from the Gardner’s walls—but then … nothing.

“Challenged, Charley relaxed a bit. ‘Who can’t stand me?’ He pondered the question and rattled off a list of names.”

How do you tell a story that ends almost as soon as it begins? Stymied by the Gardner story, I put art crime on a back burner and turned to other things.

About a decade would pass before I met Charley Hill. It quickly became clear that the story of The Scream had several of the elements I needed—a world-famous painting, first of all. Nobody would care much about a hunt for a painting they had never heard of. Second, the Scream saga began with a bold break-in, moved on to a satisfying tangle of loose ends and false leads, and ended with a confrontation in an empty house. If that wouldn’t do as beginning, middle, and