Mon 26 Jan 2015
A 1001 Midnights Review: OLIVER BANKS – The Rembrandt Panel.
Posted by Steve under 1001 Midnights , Authors , Reviews[7] Comments
by Marcia Muller
OLIVER BANKS – The Rembrandt Panel. Little, Brown, hardcover, 1980. Pinnacle, paperback, 1982.
Boston art dealer Sammy Weinstock and “runner” Harry Giardino seem to have little in common. Weinstock is reputable and knowledgeable, with a shop on Charles Street at the foot of Beacon Hill. Giardino is one of those characters who hang around on the fringes of the art world, buying up works here and there, peddling them to dealers, always waiting for a big score.
However, when both are murdered in a particularly brutal and sadistic manner, Homicide men O’Rourke and Callahan sense a connection. Unable to find what it is, they accept the help of international art detective Amos Hatcher, who is taking time off from a seemingly dead-end case in Europe.
Hatcher joins forces with the murdered dealer’s assistant, Sheila Woods, and in searching the shop they find an old and rare frame, minus its painting, with fingerprints on it that definitely link the two victims. With this discovery, the two (now lovers) start on a trail that takes them from Boston to Amsterdam to Zurich to Cape Cod — and eventually to a missing Rembrandt, a linking of Hatcher’s two cases, and a cold-blooded killer.
This is an excellent novel, packed with information about art and the people who make their livings from it. The characterization is uniformly good, especially the established relationship between O’Rourke and Callahan (which is full of humorous camaraderie) and the growing one between Hatcher and Woods.
This, plus the vivid depiction of the somewhat seedy side of Beacon Hill and the various foreign settings, does a great deal to make up for the fact that the plot moves slowly. We know all along who the killer is and what his motivations are, but nonetheless the story sustains our interest on the way to a satisfying conclusion.
Banks’s second novel, The Caravaggio Obsession, which also has an art background, was published in 1984.
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Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007. Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.
Bio-Bibliographic Notes: Amos Hatcher also appeared in Banks’s second novel, but this pair of art-oriented novels are the only mysteries he wrote. For another review of The Rembrandt Panel, check out J. F. Norris’s blog here. Banks himself was an art consultant and critic in New York City. He died in 1991, only 50 years old.
January 26th, 2015 at 5:13 pm
It’s hard to believe this book is 35 years old. It seems like half a lifetime ago. It was on my to-be-read pile for a long time, but I never got to it, and now my copy is packed away, somewhere.
January 26th, 2015 at 6:04 pm
I can’t agree more about what an entertaining and well written book this is. A bit slow as the review says, but easily one of my favorites of that era. The sequel was the rarity as good as the first one.
January 26th, 2015 at 8:37 pm
Sometimes I think that mystery books and authors from the 1980s are more forgotten than those from the so-called Golden Age of the 1930s.
January 26th, 2015 at 11:53 pm
You may be right. These two were great reads and now barely remembered and I can think of too many others that fit.
They don’t really seem all that dated to me, though I suppose there is a whole generation as baffled by what we did without the Internet and Texting as we were by what our parents did without television (though I got in on the tail end of radio drama).
I any case I don’t really think anyone would go wrong with these and the background about crime in the art world is still fairly accurate. That hasn’t changed since Adam Worth stole the Mona Lisa for J. P. Morgan.
February 1st, 2015 at 5:00 pm
I was lucky to have read this review and then to have found this book through my local library. It had been sitting on the shelf all these years and showed almost no signs of ever having been read, which is a real shame as this was a damned good read. I’m going to get the sequel next.
February 1st, 2015 at 5:25 pm
Glad to have steered you in the right direction, Howard!
May 18th, 2021 at 7:40 pm
By odd circumstance I also can recall having read, ‘The Rembrandt Panel’ and liking it very much.
No idea how I came across it. Similarly, Ken Follett’s art heist novel, ‘The Modigliani Scandal’ …another instance of a thrilling, escapist, slick’n’stylish read where one also learned a bit of history.