# 5 The Vatican Rip (©1981)
Genre: Mystery
Location: Rome, Italy
In The Vatican Rip (1981), an Italian checks Lovejoy out at Seddon's auction rooms (where Lovejoy, angered at the auctioneer's ill treatment of Tinker, publicly points out the fakes on sale). The Italian then shadows Lovejoy at the Three Cups and threatens his friends in the hope of forcing Lovejoy to go to Italy, learn Italian, and steal from the Vatican a Chippendale table the Italian claims was stolen from his family. The opening lines set the tone: "The trouble with life is, you start off worse and go downhill." In Rome, Lovejoy forms an alliance with a seemingly elderly female con artist, who enlivens the action with a repertoire of disguises, tasty tidbits on the Vatican, and an irrepressibly larcenous approach to life. He works part-time in an antique shop while perfecting the plan for the heist and plotting revenge on his employer. When he makes his move, however--a "fiddle switch"--he finds a fake already in place, his employer a cardinal, and himself an intended dupe. The caper is, as Callendar wrote in The New York Times Book Review (21 February 1982), "well-planned and executed" and the writing "urgent, realistic, amusing," but the explanations "lame" and the motivations "less believable than in the past." Nevertheless, the shooting of Pope John Paul II the week the novel was published and its detailed description of the Vatican's security system resulted in the initial printing selling out in two days.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 276: British Mystery and Thriller Writers Since 1960. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Gina Macdonald, Nicholls State University. Gale Group, 2003. pp. 160-174.
No comments:
Post a Comment