A heist is a very particular sort of crime with a very particular emotional hold over readers. Every time that I mention to someone that I’ve written a heist book, they tell me exactly how they would pull off a heist. And some of them are pretty good. Most of them are bananas.
I’ve written so many different kinds of crimes over the past ten years that if the FBI were to pull up my Google searches, I would most definitely be on several different watch lists. I hold my breath every time I go through a customs checkpoint.
And even though I’ve written everything from murder to political fraud to identity theft, the heist is the hardest crime I’ve ever tried to pull off on the page. I think that’s because the heist has been so thoroughly mythologized in American culture.
People tend to think of art thieves as brilliant masterminds operating three steps ahead of everyone else, and art theft itself as a glamorous crime with an impossibly elaborate plan orchestrated by painfully good-looking people with excellent hair. I call this the Clooney-Brosnan conundrum.
Unlike murder, a heist also occupies a strange place in our collective imagination. Many people view museums, galleries, and wealthy collectors as institutions that exist for the rich rather than for ordinary people. Whether that’s fair or not, it creates a kind of Robin Hood narrative around art thieves. We don’t necessarily approve of what they’re doing, but we often find ourselves rooting for them anyway.
That creates a problem for a novelist.
A murder only has to feel plausible. A heist has to feel plausible and ingenious and sexy at the same time. Readers want to be surprised by the plan, but they also want to believe it could actually work. They want the elegance of The Thomas Crown Affair and the ingenuity of Ocean’s Eleven.
When I started writing The Parisian Heist, I quickly realized that movies weren’t going to help me. I needed experts.
That reporting led me to Anthony Amore, head of security at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and Robert Wittman, founder of the FBI Art Crime Team. Between them, they’ve spent decades studying stolen art, recovering stolen art, investigating art thieves, and thinking about the vulnerabilities that criminals exploit. What I got from them was a completely different way of thinking about how a heist actually works.
Here’s what I learned about writing a believable (and still delicious) heist.
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Know your Timeframe and Your Tech.
The writer needs to know exactly what year their heist takes place and what kind of technology would be available.
My novel is set in 1996, largely because I wanted to avoid smartphones. Smartphones solve too many problems and create a bunch of others. The second you hand every character a device capable of instant communication, GPS navigation, facial recognition, reverse image searches, and access to the sum of all human knowledge, the mechanics of a thriller change dramatically. In my opinion, they get way more boring.
The technology inside museums was also radically different in 1996. Security cameras still recorded onto videotapes. Overnight footage was often grainy and black-and-white.
Museums weren’t storing information in the cloud because there was no cloud. Security offices were filled with bulky CRT monitors rather than sleek digital displays. Information-sharing between institutions was slower, records were less accessible, and many of the technological tools we take for granted today simply didn’t exist.
Understanding those limitations helped me build a more believable crime.
Museum security doesn’t work the way novelists think it does.
Writers tend to imagine security as a binary. Either the thieves get through it, or they don’t.
Actual museum security is far more nuanced. As Anthony Amore explained to me, the purpose of many security systems isn’t to create an impenetrable fortress. The purpose of security is to buy time. Motion sensors, cameras, alarms, glass-break detectors, security hardware, access controls, and overnight guards all exist to slow a thief down long enough for somebody to notice.
Once I understood that, I stopped thinking about how my characters would defeat the system and started thinking about how much time they could actually have.
Getting In Might Be Easy. Getting the Painting Off the Wall Will Be Trickier Than You Think.
Eventually, somebody has to physically remove the painting from the wall.
That sounds obvious, but it turned out to be one of the most useful questions I asked during my research.
Most readers imagine art theft in abstract terms. The painting slides off the wall, and the thief escapes. End scene.
Museum professionals think about hardware like brackets, mounting systems, security screws, and the tools used to remove them. They think a lot about how long it takes to free an object from its display.
Anthony Amore explained that many institutions rely on specialized security screws that require uncommon tools to remove. These measures won’t necessarily stop a determined thief, but they create friction and delays, forcing criminals to spend precious seconds wrestling with an object.
The Theft Itself Is Only Half the Plan.
When most people imagine an art crime, they focus on the moment the painting comes off the wall. In reality, a masterpiece is not a sack of cash. You cannot simply steal a Vermeer and convert it into money the next day. The moment a major work becomes famous for being stolen, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to sell through any legitimate channel.
Amore described countless situations in which thieves stole valuable works, believing they would get rich, only to discover that the painting was too famous to move. At that point, the artwork often becomes something else entirely. It often becomes a bargaining chip in another criminal enterprise.
As a novelist, this completely changed how I thought about motive. Why is this particular painting being stolen? What does the thief actually hope to accomplish? What happens the day after the crime?
All of these questions turned out to be far more interesting than dodging laser beams without mussing up very excellent hair.
The temptation when writing crime fiction is always to make the drama bigger and more extraordinary, but the more I spoke with the experts, the more I realized that real criminals operate with limited resources, information, and time. The challenge is creating a plan that works despite all the things that can go wrong.
That realization shaped every aspect of The Parisian Heist. The heist at the center of the novel isn’t driven by futuristic technology or impossible feats of engineering. It’s driven by preparation, timing and an understanding of how institutional security actually functions.
A convincing heist may look boring on paper, and it also involves a lot of preparation and even more luck.
It may not be sexy, but hopefully your readers will find themselves rooting for the thieves anyway.
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