You might expect the tale of a heist of rare birds from a British museum is the stuff novels, but it happened. Lest anyone think the best heist stories are fictional, enter The Feather Thief (Penguin Random House, 2018) by Kirk Wallace Johnson. Indeed, that bit probably saves the book. As the crew’s leader, Will, thinks on what he’s about to do, he reflects that he “had always known history was told by the conquerors.” The book collapses history into the plot, and thus into the heist, and is all the better for it. The recurring exploration of familial pressure, the drive to succeed and striving for justice – a form of vigilante reparation – in the face of past and present colonialism adds welcome depth to the story, though. The heist bits are thin and amateurish, but that may be by design.
The premise of the book is excellent, but the characters are underdeveloped while their connections to one another often feel tacked on. Twists and turns and failures (or are they?). Portrait of a Thief follows the familiar heist tropes itself. The score promises a big payday, but the crew is also chasing justice for their homeland as they reflect upon and seek to right, in some small way, the looting and burning by the British and French of the Old Summer Palace in Beijing during the Second Opium War.
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Li relies on this force to animate her story of a series of amateur thieves, college kids who take on a job they have no business trying – to steal precious pieces of Chinese art held by Western museums around the world and turn them over to a collector in China. In Portrait of a Thief (Tiny Reparations Books, 2022), Grace D. These folks are going to steal this thing, but the victim of the crime had it coming. It acts as a moral force, an argument, implicit or explicit, that the ends justify the means, which they do sometimes. Justice is a common theme in heist stories. “ ‘I will,’ said Kaz, ‘if there’s any justice in the world. “You’ll get what’s coming to you someday, Brekker,” says Geels, as his plan fall to entrap his opponent falls apart. In that morally ambiguous spirit, we find Kaz at the outset of the book extricating himself and his crew from a trap set by a rival gang. Themes of class, prejudice, and justice add heft to the page-turning drive of the plot, and a subtle noir edge brings the whole thing together. The characters and world are developed in tandem with the right mix of backstory, exposition and bits you’re left to figure out for yourself. Marketed as a young-adult novel and told from the alternating perspective of several characters, the book is brilliantly plotted, exquisitely written, properly paced and deeply compelling. The man who has been taken holds the secret to a destructive discovery that not only alters the balance of power in their world, but threatens to utterly upend the realm and sow chaos. In Six of Crows (Square Fish, 2015), Leigh Bardugo draws on familiar tropes built around an intricate fantasy realm – part of her Grishaverse – to tell the story of Kaz Brekker and his crew of young crooks who set out to capture a prisoner being held by a rival state in an impenetrable fortress. If a mystery novel tends to ask “Who did it?”, a heist novel asks “How did they do it?”, followed closely by “What now?” After all, by the dictates of the genre, the thief or thieves are up against long odds, mismatched but interdependent characters, betrayals, distractions, unexpected twists, a distracting thirst for revenge and, of course, the lure of … one … last … job. But the heart of the thing is in the machinations of the steal and the relationships that shape the job before, during and, most importantly, after. The brilliance of a good heist book – or film, television series, or game – is partly dependent on the characters (what endeavour isn’t?). And there’s always someone, or some crew, to steal it. You have sci-fi heists, noir heists, romantic heists, mob heists, fantasy heists. Heist writing is a genre of its own, but it crosses boundaries to connect with others. They help set it apart from others, even though genres, like the tropes that help construct them, twist and bend and intersect. They make the genus familiar and cohesive.
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