Finding Vermeer

My second novel, The Music Lesson, is about an IRA splinter group's plot to steal a Vermeer from the Queen. In the course of the story, the mysterious circumstances of the unsolved theft of paintings from the Gardner Museum in Boston are explained. (Make that "explained" for the literal-minded among us. It is a novel. But my fictional explanation may well be on the money.) The 1990 theft (the largest single property theft in American history) of thirteen paintings and objects has never been solved, and today the Gardner continues to exhibit the empty frames of the missing masterpieces.

Last week, the FBI swarmed the Manchester, Connecticut home of "reputed mobster" Robert Gentile (aren't all "mobsters" invariably "reputed"?) , who federal prosecutors apparently believe has a link to that heist.
Gentile, 75, is being held without bail pending his federal trial on drug dealing charges. The FBI used a ground-penetrating radar device as well as dogs in the search. Most intriguing is the site of a filled-in swimming pool on Gentile's property. While the search warrant was apparently for weapons, Gentile's attorney told the Boston Globe "We all know what they are actually looking for - and they are looking for the paintings." Evidence obtained that day is now being sifted. Obviously, they haven't found a cache of paintings. Yet.

Readers of The Music Lesson, published in 1999, nine years after the Gardner theft, will recognize why this latest development is of particular interest to me. Saying more would be a plot spoiler.

"The museum continues to offer a $5 million reward for information leading to the recovery of the artworks in good condition," museum officials said in a statement. "Anyone with information about the theft, the location of the stolen artworks, and/or the investigation, should contact the Gardner Museum." On its website, the museum also urges those in possession of the stolen masterpieces "to conserve them in recommended temperatures and humidity levels."

Stay tuned!

Finding Vermeer?

The FBI arrested the murderous 81-year-old Boston mob boss Whitey Bulger this morning at his condo in Santa Monica, where he had been living with his girlfriend in broad daylight despite being on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List for the past sixteen years. This is fantstic news!

Why do I care? Because I am among those who believe that he may hold some key information about the unsolved Gardner Museum heist, which is central to the plot in my 1999 novel The Music Lesson (just reissued this year from Broadway in an attractive new paperback edition). Does the Gardner get Vermeer's "The Concert" back on its wall where the blank space has been maintained ever since it was stolen in 1990? Fingers crossed.

The Music Lesson redux

This week, the new Broadway paperback of my second novel, The Music Lesson, was published. I am thrilled that my 1999 novel has steadily appealed to readers in more than a dozen languages and has been a perennial with book groups. The Picador paperback ran through eleven printings, and I am optimistic that the Broadway edition will have a nice long shelf life.

I am especially happy that Random House/Broadway are my new paperback publishers, with True Confections just out from Broadway, and with my first novel, Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, scheduled to appear later this year, in July. It is a major big deal for a novelist to have an entire backlist in print. It's a terrific vote of confidence from the publisher, and I am grateful.

The Unluck of the Irish

I am in West Cork at the moment, the setting for The Music Lesson. I included many instances of traditional Irish superstitions and beliefs in the story, but I hear more every time I am here, many of them poetic and strange. Most recently, I heard that it is bad luck to enter a house with your two hands at the same level, though it is unclear to me whose bad luck this will bring, yours or the person whose house you have entered.

Other odd beliefs that have been mentioned lately include these:

The bed of a sick person must be placed north and south never crossways.

There is one hour in the day during which a wish made will come true. But no one knows what the hour is.

Never cut an infant's nails until it he is a year old, or he will become a thief.

The first days of the year and of the week are the luckiest.

Friday is the most unlucky day of all, and no one should begin a journey, or move into a new house, or begin a business, or cut a new dress on a Friday. Most urgently, never bring a cat from one house to another on a Friday. (If only I had known about this fear, it would surely have appeared in The Music Lesson.)

It is good to cut your hair at the new moon, and especially by the light of the moon. But not on a Friday!

The West Cork Landscape

I am in Ireland at the moment, in the West Cork village that inspired my second novel, The Music Lesson (which I am pleased to report will be republished in a nice new paperback edition by Three Rivers Press in January).

Because I didn't want to identify the village where we spent our honeymoon in 1976 and have owned a cottage since 1986, I didn't consider mentioning one of the most prominent and identifiable features of Glandore, the Drombeg stone circle. But I regret not setting a scene there. A country mile from my doorstep, the Drombeg stone circle, one of the most intact in all of Ireland, is an uncanny place where a sense of the past looms very large. Ireland has many pasts, from the mysterious culture that built these circles to the maiming hatred that has kept the troubles simmering for nearly a hundred years.

Wide Duchess or Narrow Lady?

I am in Ireland at the moment, finishing up a revision of my own screenplay adaptation of The Music Lesson. It's a great task for a writer, writing through a finished novel in order to transpose it into another medium, and the job has given me some new insights into novel structure. I am also involved in a renovation of the cottage we have owned in West Cork since 1986.

In The Music Lesson, Patricia is alone in a cottage at the edge of the sea in West Cork, minding a priceless Vermeer portrait that has been stolen from the Queen for political purposes. In all her observing of Irish life, it didn't occur to me to have her ponder the traditional names for different sizes of roof slates, which are quite superb:

(All sizes are in inches - length x width)
Empress
26 x 16

Princess or Wide Duchess
24 x 14

Duchess
24 x 12
Small Duchess
22 x 12
Marchioness
22 x 11
Broad/Wide Countess
20 x 12
Countess
20 x 10
Small Countess
18 x 10
Viscountess
18 x 9
Wide Lady
16 x 10
Broad Lady
16 x 9
Lady
16 x 8
Wide Header
14 x 12
Header
14 x 10
Small Lady
14 x 8
Narrow Lady
14 x 7
Small Header
13 x 10
Double
12 x 6
Single
10 x 5

A Very Complicated Toast to Vermeer

My second novel, The Music Lesson, concerns an IRA splinter group plot to steal a Vermeer from the Queen. It came out in 1999, and was followed within the year by the more successful (which is not to say that The Music Lesson didn't do very well -- it did, and it continues to sell nicely in multiple languages) Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. Both novels, and some others, were written in the aftermath of the Vermeer exhibition in Washington and The Hague, and Vermeer's zeitgeist stock has been blue chip ever since, kept in high public consciousness not necessarily for visual reasons but simply because of the staying power of cultural trends.

On a recent visit to a Dutch Master painting show at The Metropolitan Museum, I was aware more than once of people exclaiming with excitement when they spotted wall text identifying a Vermeer. I wished for the opportunity to experiment with a change of identification on the museum walls, to watch people swoon passionately over a previously bypassed De Hooch or Metsu once it was labelled Vermeer.

But anyway. A recent news article in the San Francisco Chronicle attracted my attention, because it featured a Vermeer-inspired cocktail. It's called The Milkmaid, though it has no milk in it, and no sun-dappled milkmaid will come to your house and make it for you. Invented by Ektoras Binikos, a Greek-born artist and bartender at Oceana in New York, The Milkmaid has an ounce of Bols geneva in it, which apparently makes it sufficiently Dutch and therefore Vermeerish. It's also really, really complicated:

2 thin slices fresh ginger
1/2 ounce Citrus Mint Syrup (see recipe)
3 to 4 dashes Angostura bitters
1 ounce Bols genever
1/2 ounce Domain de Canton ginger liqueur
1 ounce fresh lemon juice
1/2 ounce yuzu juice
1/2 ounce (1 tablespoon) egg white
1 piece crystallized ginger candy, for garnish
Instructions: In a mixing glass, muddle together the fresh ginger, Citrus Mint Syrup and bitters. Add ice and the rest of the ingredients except the garnish, and shake well. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Add the garnish.

Citrus Mint Syrup:
Makes about 2 cups
1 small bunch fresh mint, trimmed and washed
-- Zest of 1/2 orange
-- Zest of 1/2 lemon
2 cups granulated sugar
1 cup water
Instructions: Combine all ingredients in a nonreactive saucepan and place over medium heat. Bring to a gentle simmer, stirring frequently, and cook about 5 minutes, until syrup thickens slightly. Remove from the heat and let cool to room temperature. Strain through a double layer of dampened cheesecloth.

Would Vermeer have been interested in this Dutch Mojito? He probably drank Dutch beer and cocoa.

Vermeer Moves the Earth

Every time I pass a construction site and see one of Vermeer's diggers or chippers at work, I regret that I didn't make a reference in The Music Lesson (which features a stolen Vermeer portrait) to the curious coincidence that the uncommon name of one of the greatest painters who ever lived on earth is shared by a company manufacturing construction equipment.