Most true crime TV tends toward the lurid, the sensational, the gory, the depraved. So Netflix’s new documentary series, This is a Robbery, comes as a breath of fresh air to the genre. Their cold case? A 1991 unsolved art heist at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
You may be familiar with the case—the night after St. Patrick’s Day, men wearing police uniforms hustled their way into one of Boston’s most beautiful museums and hustled their way out again 81 minutes later with thirteen irreplaceable (and uninsured) works of art, including Rembrandt’s only seascape, also a Vermeer, a Manet, five Degat works, and two other Rembrandts, worth a total estimated value of $500,000,000. Yes, five hundred million. The Gardner Museum made the gutsy decision to continue displaying the emptied frames in the gallery, where they still hang, 30 years later.
Every creator had to have their first work. For Michael Crichton, that was Odds On, a heist novel written while he was in medical school, published under the pen name John Lange. Odds On was re-released after nearly 50 years, before Crichton’s death, along with seven other “lost” novels, by Hard Case Crime (check out links below to my previous reviews in the series). Odds On is both a classic product of its time and a study in writing, as we the readers get the benefit of hindsight, knowing what Crichton would later become. In Odds On, we get to see the author begin to establish what would become his own unique storytelling style.
Although this is not Crichton at its best, every newfound Crichton book is a pleasure to read. Some of his John Lange novels have better storytelling than a few of his later pre-Jurassic Park novels. For all the commonality you can find among his five decades of works, the subject of each is varied and his characters also intriguing and different. But Crichton novels often are gripping, unputdownable reads that ultimately fail to deliver a satisfying ending. Odds On shows that quirk was there from day one. Yet, if you’re a fan of the 1960s version of “trashy” pulp novels, with oversexed guys, oversexed gals, and a few crime twists, the ride is a good one. This is the Crichton novel Doubleday rejected for being too “saucy.”
A twist on the pulp trashy novel, sex becomes a factor for each of the main characters in the book, and there are plenty of characters to get to. Odds On follows a mastermind planning a heist of jewelry at a new luxury hotel in Spain. He has enlisted two other men and this new-fangled contraption, a computer, and its “critical path analysis” program, to plan the heist. The only thing the computer doesn’t tell him is he and his men would have better odds at success if they laid off the pregame sexcapades, or the actual habits and patterns of individuals who frequent high-end hotels. Crichton deserves some credit–this is not the misogynistic fare of Ian Fleming and other contemporaries. Sure, some of his characters are drooling, brainless Neanderthals, but the women all are strong, defiant, and intriguing in their own ways. Crichton was certainly ahead of his time in this genre. Unlike his later works, his leads are not as fleshed out as his supporting characters, here that’s four very different women who drive the story forward and keep the reader engaged until the final chapter.
