# 16 Paid and Loving Eyes (©1993)
Genre: Mystery
Location: England
Paid and Loving Eyes (1993), the plot of which critics have labeled "baroque," "cryptic," and "mindboggling," has a confusing array of characters, including a bevy of scheming females sexually conquering and manipulating Lovejoy (his former wife, Cissie, among them). Lovejoy's women come from all classes and backgrounds, but most are high-handed and scheming and even the good-hearted and innocent eventually find Lovejoy incorrigible. About them Lovejoy asserts "women talk in the pluperfect vindictive" and, even with the best of motives, unsettle a man's life. Nevertheless, he believes, "the lusts for antiques and women are one and the same" and "the sin within a woman's smile," to paraphrase the title of another Lovejoy novel, offers him a passion akin to the passion and the sin that antiques embody for him. While moonlighting as the driver of a van engaged for clandestine sexual encounters, Lovejoy ends up judging an illicit contest of antiques, spotting the fake, and thereby unwittingly dooming its forger. Then, compelled by Cissie's faked (or real) death, he becomes enmeshed in a complicated Continental antiques scam involving an underworld ring, a Swiss repository, defrauded insurance companies, and a hunt by the "paid but loving" eyes of SAPAR (Stolen Art and Purloined Antiques Rescue), a group of watchdogs of the antiques trade, out to expose fraud and exploitation. In addition to witty descriptions of France as a "gentle" land of "lies," "cruelty," and "preconceptions," tips on French antiques and on master fakers, and negative portraits of drug abuse, Gash's social conscience shines through, and the book exposes the horrors of debt-bonded indentured servitude in the European antiques trade--the use of young children to duplicate the injurious, bloody eighteenth- and nineteenth-century techniques of polishing and finishing furniture--and of white slavery for similar purposes in Third World countries: "the exploitation of over 3 million child slaves." The pain of children reproducing mahogany furniture in Dickensian workshops leaves him overwhelmed at the craftsmanship but physically ill at the human cost. Thus, Lovejoy blows up an antiques repository and with it a gang of unscrupulous antiquarians whose frauds depend on child labor.
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.
