Stolen van Gogh Painting Worth

Millions Returned In An Ikea Bag

Thanks to a world-renowned art detective, an early Vincent van Gogh painting is back home three and a half years after it was stolen from a Dutch museum. Arthur Brand (pictured), known as the "Indiana Jones of the art world,” last week announced the recovery of The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring, an 1884 canvas estimated to be worth between $3.2 and $6.4 million. He had received an anonymous tip from an individual who delivered the bubble-wrapped painting to his Amsterdam apartment in a bag from an Ikea furniture store. The person who returned the painting is not believed to be involved in the theft, which took place before dawn on March 30, 2020—van Gogh’s birthday—at the Singer Laren museum in the Netherlands. Authorities arrested the culprit behind the heist in April 2021, using DNA evidence left on a broken picture frame to link a man identified only as Nils M. to the theft of the van Gogh, as well as a Frans Hal painting stolen in August 2020. A Dutch court sentenced Nils to eight years in prison and ordered him to pay nearly $9 million in compensation to the owner of the Hals. Prosecutors believe Nils stole the van Gogh on the orders of Peter Roy K., a Dutch shipping mogul involved in drug smuggling, who hoped to use the artwork as leverage for negotiating a reduced prison sentence. Brand told The Guardian that the tipster who returned the painting contacted him, saying, “Mr. Brand, I could turn in the van Gogh, but I don’t want to get in trouble.” The art detective “had to gain his confidence” before the man agreed to drop off the canvas in a meeting sanctioned by authorities.

In The Race To Catch The Last Nazis,

Time Has Become The Enemy

A lifetime after the Holocaust, a few of its perpetrators somehow remain at large—and the German detectives tasked with bringing them to justice are making a final desperate push to hunt them down. A new article by Tom Lamont in GQ magazine chronicles the efforts of one such hunter named Thomas Will, the chief of a German bureau created decades ago to investigate historic atrocities and to track down aiders and abettors of the Holocaust. “All these years after the collapse of the Third Reich, many of the suspects that Will tries to bring to justice die on him,” Lamont says. “The Bureau, founded in 1958, officially is known as ‘the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes,’ although most people involved shorten it to ‘the cental office’ or ‘the unit.’ . Somewhat in the manner of a le Carré spy referring to MI5 as the Circus, Will uses an unexpected English phrase for his place of work: ‘our house.’” While Nazis are the target, time is definitely the enemy, as many of the few remaining perpetrators now are in their 90s. “The next generation will not have a chance to work judicially on this,” Will told Lamont. “It ends in these years, now, in the 2020s. We are prosecuting the last of the crimes.” In doing so, he and his colleagues are heirs to a deep tradition of Nazi chasers, even if they differ—in task and technique—from their more swashbuckling forebears.

Pseudocide: When Characters (Or Real People) Fake Their Own Deaths

Pseudocide—the act (or fantasy) of faking one’s own death—offers a tantalizing escape from reality, leaving behind all the problems and complications of our lives. The concept has been around for centuries, with the first known story dating back to ancient Rome in which Claudius, the Roman politician, faked his own passing to avoid assassination attempts, and ultimately went on to live a long life in hiding. The use of pseudocide in literature gained popularity during the Romantic era, when such writers as Edgar Allan Poe utilized the trope in his stories. For instance, in “The Cask of Amontillado,” the offending character lures his victim into a wine cellar and walls him up alive, before faking his own death and escaping. An even earlier case is Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in which Juliet—knowing that her family will never approve of her love for Romeo—drinks a potion that allows her to mimic her demise. And in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, the two main characters kill a family of four and attempt to escape by faking their own deaths. As Manning Wolff points out in a recent Crime Reads article, “Ultimately, for authors, characters, and readers, the popularity of the pseudocide device reflects our universal desire for new beginnings and the possibility of redemption. It’s a reminder that no matter how dire our circumstances may seem, there’s always a possibility for change.”

Every Coin Left On A Gravestone

Has A Significant Meaning

Have you ever visited a cemetery and noticed an odd collection of things left on some of the gravestones? From flowers to stones to ladies’ undergarments (as is often the case with Jim Morrison’s burial site in Paris), there’s a sentiment behind why visitors leave particular items. Such is the case with coins, which are often left behind in honor of those individuals who served this country through military service. As noted in last week’s Reader’s Digest, coins are similar to gold stars on license plates, and not only are they a meaningful way for people to convey their pride in a loved one who is no longer with them, but also to let loved ones know that other people have been to pay their respects. Also, as you might guess, different coins have different associations; for instance, a penny on a gravestone is a simple act of gratitude for the person’s service. Anyone can leave a penny, whether they are a family member, friend, or fellow service person. A nickel on the gravestone means that the visitor who left it went to boot camp with the person buried, while a dime indicates that the visitor served with the deceased military member. A quarter, on the other hand, signifies that a previous visitor was present when the soldier passed away.

RETROSPECTIVE

Dime Detectives, Pulp Fiction, And The Great Depression Of Cornell Woolrich

The Great Depression, which commenced in the United States with the calamitous stock market crash in the autumn of 1929, spread rapidly over the wasting country like a plague of locusts, devouring both American livelihoods and lives. In that auspicious year, a young author names Cornell Woolrich was living large in sunny southern California, where he had been lured by film producers to write screenplays based on the success of his popular novels Cover Charge and Children of the Ritz. Failing in both his Hollywood aspirations and marriage, he went back to writing novels, and quickly became a prolific author of pulp and detective fiction. His first crime story was titled “Death Sits in the Dentist’s Chair,” which appeared in Detective Fiction Weekly and netted its author the sum of $105 (about $2100 today). It was followed by over two hundred pieces of short fiction, making him one of the most popular crime writers of the period. As noted in the blog The Passing Tramp, “Doubtless there were tougher pulp writers than Cornell Woolrich, but not one of them was as anxious as he and the characters he created. The pale, auburn-haired, anemic-looking man holed-up in a room at the Hotel Marseilles, and seemingly was harried by a thousand fears—and he gave those fears free reign to roam amid the looming shadows of his unforgettable crime fiction.”

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INDIGO ROAD

“Indigo Road is a beautifully wrought, hard-biting story with elements of classic noir presented through a prism of modern sensibilities. A fantastic read.” –S.A. Cosby, bestselling author of Razorblade Tears 

While still slinging drinks fulltime at The Sandbar in Folly Beach, Jack Connor works a side gig as a licensed bounty hunter. One afternoon, as he's transporting his latest bail skip named Willis Ronson back to jail, his SUV is ambushed by a team of gunmen, killing Ronson instantly and seriously injuring his court-appointed attorney, Alisha Dupree. Connor can’t help but poke around the edges of the deadly incident and quickly learns that Ronson was a man of many secrets, including a mysterious woman from his past who has caused him to be sucked into a domestic terrorist fringe group.