The Irish Game

The Irish Game by Matthew Hart   205 pages

This is an occasionally entertaining true recounting of a series of heists of the Beit art collection at Russborough House in Ireland. In addition to gangsters, Matthew Hart gives us a rogue English Heiress, the IRA, the FBI, Interpol, Scotland Yard, and of course, the Irish Garda. 

In the annals of art theft, no case has matched-for sheer criminal panache-the heist at Ireland's Russborough House in 1986. The Irish police knew right away that the mastermind was a Dublin gangster named Martin Cahill. Yet the great plunder -including a Gainsborough, a Goya, two Rubenses, and a Vermeer- remained at large for years. Cahill taunted the police with a string of other crimes, but in the end it was the paintings that brought him low. The challenge of disposing of such famous works forced him to reach outside his familiar world into the international arena, and when he did, his pursuers were waiting. 

One criticism about the book is that Hart distilled all the artistic facts, multiple biographies, Irish history, and police procedure into a single story that ultimately confused with too many narratives and tangents. In his effort to lay bare the minutia, he created a story that rambled and was bogged down by too much information to be entertaining. One such example is the inclusion of chapters on two other major art heists, one at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and the theft of Edvard Munch's The Scream from the National Gallery of Norway. Although they are great heists with tenuous relevance to this story, they distract from the narrative flow, especially near the end of book as the sting operation to take down Cahill plays out.

Posted by: Regina C.