Deception, delusion, and the pursuit of filthy lucre

June 20, 2004

According to the calendar, summer begins tomorrow, and the days will become shorter and the long slide toward winter will commence. As I see it, the best part of summer is spring, which is not only a time of promise but, for the professional reader, a time to luxuriate in books to recommend to others for their summer reading.

I have a special place in my heart for tales of badness, or ''true crime," as publishers style it. The best of these books display a decorous enjoyment of dastardliness, curiosity about character and motivation, and an appreciation for the mischief of Fortune. Matthew Hart's ''The Irish Game: A True Story of Crime and Art" (Walker, $24) is exemplary and told with a natural storyteller's pacing and grace. In fewer than 200 pages the author presents half a dozen art thefts, conjures up a wonderful assemblage of heroes and villains, identifies the shabby role played by art theft in international crime, and lays before us revelations about Vermeer's work that might still be unsuspected had his ''Lady Writing a Letter With Her Maid" not been stolen -- twice.

Two times the work was cut from its frame and bundled out of the venerable halls of Russborough House, in Ireland. In 1974 it and 18 other paintings were seized by an English heiress turned revolutionary and a gang of IRA spongers. Retrieved and restored, it was made off with again 12 years later, by Martin Cahill, a.k.a. the General, a physically and morally repellent Dublin crime boss. The bulk of the book involves this theft -- which included 17 other paintings -- and the various elaborately plotted sting operations mounted to recover the booty. (One was scuppered by an errant FBI memo stuck in a bunch of photos being displayed by an undercover agent to a group of criminals he was courting. Out it fluttered before their combined, horrified gaze, and the game was up.) What makes this book so enjoyable is the author's deftness and restraint with what was a big splashy story, one that made headlines blare and columns march into infinity in the Irish newspapers. Rather than simply banking on its celebrity, Hart delivers the tale with amused moderation and an understated relish for the perfidy, audacity, avenging determination, strange twists, and unlooked-for denouements it holds.