The Art of Stealing: "The Episode of the Nine Monets" (2020) by Jamie Probin

Jamie Probin is a British-born mathematician currently living in Charleston, South Carolina, where he teaches mathematics at Charleston Southern University and writes detective novels and short stories featuring his mathematician-detective, Dr. Samuel Harris – who's something of a locked room specialist. I should have gotten to this series before now, but it got loss in the mass of reprints, translations and neo-Golden Age mysteries. That's until Jim Noy, of The Invisible Event, reviewed Probin's newest, non-series short story "Chapter 17: Perroquet Explains" (2026). So moved this series up the big pile.

I wanted to begin with Probin's The Thirteenth Apostle (2020), but the short story "The Episode of the Nine Monets" (2020) is a prequel and Jim's review suggested reading it before the novel ("...because it sets up the world well..."). What it sets up, or rather introduces, is a duel between the master criminal Le Fantôme and the Sûreté, Scotland Yard and Dr. Harris.

Henry Toussante, Patrick Larson and Alain Noble, of the Sûreté, have been trying to put a stop to the shenanigans of Le Fantôme for years, which is easier said than done considering the phantom thief's affinity for the impossible crimes and a gift for disguises – getting bolder with each new scheme. Such as Le Fantôme's latest caper involving the inexplicable disappearance of an early, little-known work by Claude Monet, "never exhibited publicly," belonging to the millionaire banker Jacques DuFresne. It hung in DuFresne's Paris townhouse, securely locked, bolted and barred from the inside, but nevertheless disappeared from the locked townhouse. Even stranger, Le Fantôme exchanged the Monet for a plain, white canvas with "a childish outline of a ghost etched into the centre with a few simple strokes of black paint." I wonder if Probin is familiar with Kaito KID from Gosho Aoyama's Case Closed series.

Anyway, Dr. Harris is mentioned only in passing, "ask his opinion, see if he has any ideas," but it's the men of the Sûreté who score a point over Le Fantôme. Patrick Larson, in particular, gets to play a big role with his rather unorthodox methods uncovering several copies of the stolen Monet have been sold shortly after the theft. That nicely added another impossibility to the impossible theft: how do you make a whole bunch of near perfect copies of a painting that has never been publicly displayed? Good enough copies to fool a string of collectors. However, the trick to make the Monet vanish from a locked townhouse is the better, more imaginative and fairly-clued of the two impossibilities. More importantly, "The Episode of the Nine Monets" is exactly what a story about an Arsène Lupin-style character pulling off impossible crime capers should be... incredibly fun and entertaining.

I said Sûreté scored a point over Le Fantôme. They cracked the locked room problem, recovered the stolen painting and boosted their reputation, but not "the money Le Fantôme had gained from selling the forgeries" or the criminal himself – who has now captured the public's imagination ("the mood was ripe to embrace a Robin Hood-style folk hero"). The Thirteenth Apostle is going to conclude the Le Fantôme saga featuring "a trilogy of impossible murders." So that one is going to be next and hopefully it lives up "The Episode of the Nine Monets." A highlight of the 2020s impossible crime story and locked room revival.

A note for the curious: the ending half-raises a point I have wondered about before. This series takes place sometime in the early-1930s, several years after "the great depression had thundered through France and the rest of the western world,"
which is why Le Fantôme was becoming an anti-hero here. I have sometimes wondered if the figure the Gentleman Thief could have ever challenged the popularity of the Great Detective. Writers like Maurice Leblanc and E.W. Hornung made their mark with Arsène Lupin and Raffles, but the Rogue School perhaps needed their own Agatha Christie or John Dickson Carr more than a great depression. I do wonder sometimes about that strange, alternative universe where the Gentleman Thief overtook (even if only briefly) the Great Detective in popularity.