The Duke of Wellington, Kidnapped! The Incredible True Story of the Art Heist That Shocked a Nation

This colorful true-crime story makes a zany whodunit out of an art heist that stunned England’s National Gallery in London more than 50 years ago. In late August of 1961, the Duke of Wellington by Spanish painter Francisco Goya, a national treasure purchased months earlier for £140,000, disappeared from the museum. Over the next four years, the thief tried unsuccessfully to ransom the return of the painting through letters sent to Reuters and other news outlets. Two months after the painting was returned unharmed in 1965, Kempton Bunton, a 61-year-old gadabout, confessed to the crime, claiming as his motive that he had hoped the ransom could help pay for license fees that the government charged old-age pensioners to watch television. The trial that followed was a farrago of contradictory claims by the plaintiff and missed opportunities for the prosecution that ended with Bunton escaping sentencing on the grounds that he had always intended to return the purloined portrait (although he did serve time for the destruction of its frame). Hirsch writes his debut book’s opening chapters like a finely tuned suspense thriller, alternating chapters of biography about the irascible and very unreliable Bunton and the authorities’ investigation of the crime and its clues. His description of Bunton’s amusing trial is the stuff of an Ealing Studios comic crime caper. The book’s surprise ending perfectly caps this story of the unlikely art thief who made sport of his nation’s criminal justice system.[em] (Apr.) [/em]