Makes You Wanna Holler

When Edvard Munch's painting The Scream was stolen last year from the Munch Museum in Oslo, it was hard to know how much comfort to take from the fact that 10 years earlier, a different version of the picture--there are four--had been nabbed from another Norwegian museum. On the one hand, it was a comfort that that version was returned unharmed. On the other, nobody seems to have learned anything from the first theft. Museum security was still utterly insufficient, in part because gallery officials depended on the fantasy that no one would steal such a famous painting. And you wonder why that poor little guy is always screaming.

The first Scream heist is the main concern of The Rescue Artist (HarperCollins; 270 pages), an entertaining account of the eternal struggle between high art and low cunning. Along the way, it's also a wider look at the world of art theft, a place where, to put it mildly, curatorial standards are not maintained. Gainsboroughs are manhandled by drug dealers; Vermeers are jammed into car trunks like Mafia stool pigeons. One set of thieves decided that a large Henry Moore bronze, King and Queen, was too heavy to move, so they took out a chainsaw and cut off the heads, figuring those might be worth something. It's a miracle that they didn't drill holes in the scalps and try to sell the things as planters.

Edward Dolnick, a journalist, centers his story on Charley Hill, a London undercover cop raised mostly in the U.S. who has made a specialty of tracking down purloined Goyas and Bruegels before they are fenced to Bahrain or, worse, ditched in a trash compactor. It's one of Hill's missions in life to disabuse people of the idea that art thieves are cultivated smoothies. "The thieves who steal works of art," he tells us, "were usually stealing hubcaps a few years earlier."

Just six months before the 1994 Scream theft, Hill had cracked the biggest art case in ages, the 1986 break-in at Russborough House near Dublin in which robbers made off with 11 pictures, including a precious Vermeer. In one of many cloak-and-dagger games the book recounts, Hill posed as the middleman for an Arab tycoon. He solves the Munch case by pretending to be a buyer for the wealthy J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, a role that allows him, as his work often does, to accessorize lavishly: seersucker suit, big bow tie, bigger Mercedes. It also requires him to steep himself in Scream scholarship. To ensure that con men would not try to fool him with a counterfeit version, he even memorized the pattern of wax droplets left on the work when Munch blew out a candle one night.

Dolnick reminds us that the most famous artworks have a way of turning up, although sometimes not for years. Meanwhile, they can make appearances in surprising places. There's even an art-world in joke in Dr. No, the 1962 film that introduces James Bond. On a wall of the evil doctor's Caribbean hideaway, you can spot Goya's portrait The Duke of Wellington, famously stolen the year before from the National Gallery in London. So far, though, there is no sign of The Scream version taken last year, not even in the movies. --By Richard Lacayo