James Ponti is the author of four middle grade series—The Sherlock Society, City Spies, the Edgar Award–winning Framed!, and the Dead City trilogy—and the founder of a writers group known as the Renegades of Middle Grade. He is also an Emmy–nominated television writer and producer. Here, Ponti discusses how the recent Louvre heist, with its stranger-than-fiction twists, made a mockery of his research as a mystery writer.
The recent jewelry heist at the Louvre hits us all differently. For museum officials, it’s an embarrassing lapse in security. For the people of France, it’s a heartbreaking loss of cultural treasures. And for middle grade mystery authors, it’s a disrespectful slap in the face.
I should know. I’ve got a palm print across my cheek to prove it.
I’ve written multiple heists and museum break-ins across three different book series. It’s kind of my signature. To write them, I research diligently, study historic robberies, interview workers, and painstakingly scour maps, layouts, and social media to find security lapses. This is all so I can create believably intricate plans as to how someone might penetrate cultural fortresses such as the Louvre. It turns out, all you need is a ladder, some battery-powered tools, and a getaway scooter.
Seriously?!
If I wrote a Louvre robbery the way it actually occurred, my editor would laugh in my face and readers would flood my inbox with mocking images of the Hamburglar escaping on a Vespa. (Sixth graders can be cruel that way.)
Unlike reality, fiction has to be believable. From my research, I know that most actual museum robberies are more Tom and Jerry than Thomas Crown. The Mona Lisa was swiped by a museum employee who simply carried it out under his coat. The Portrait of Jacob de Gheyn III is nicknamed the “Takeaway Rembrandt” because it’s small enough to slip under a sweater—which is exactly what a thief did one of the four times it’s been stolen. In 1964, bandits pulled off what was, for decades, the biggest jewel heist in American history by climbing through windows left open to ventilate the American Museum of Natural History. The robbery was both literally and figuratively a breeze.
Young readers demand more. I know I did. I got my first taste of museums and kid lit in the third grade when I read From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. It’s still my all-time favorite book, and a big part of its appeal is the fact that, although the story is fictional, the setting is real and recognizable. As I read it, I knew I could visit New York and see everything Claudia and Jamie saw in the book.
This inspired me to write Framed! The mystery features the theft of four Impressionist masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. I wanted to get it right, so I reached out to the museum to arrange a behind-the-scenes tour. Not surprisingly, my emails were ignored. I never said I was writing about art theft, but I’m pretty sure they guessed. Instead, I had to case the building the same way Butch Cassidy used to scope out banks in the Old West.
I watched security guards looking for patterns, studied artists in the copyist programs, and pretended to take pictures of my son standing next to paintings, while actually getting photographic evidence of how they were attached to the wall. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one watching. When I revisited the museum a year later, a guard in many of my photos approached me because he recognized me and was trying to remember why.
My book City Spies: City of the Dead begins with an elaborate break-in at the British Museum. For this, I studied how much of the collection was hidden in an abandoned tube station during World War II, and watched social media videos about present-day underground storage. With some creative license, I was able to connect the two in a way that allowed my characters to bypass security in a manner that was satisfying to readers.
These same readers started reaching out to me the moment the Louvre story broke. They all wanted to know how the City Spies or Sherlock Society might solve the case. They won’t have to wait long to find out. My newest book City Spies: Europa comes out in February. It features a series of simultaneous attacks involving the Musee d’Orsay, the Rijksmuseum, the Tate Britain, and the Vatican Museums. It’s my wife’s favorite of all my books. This is not so much because of how it’s written, but because she helped with the research. She played Sundance to my Butch as we cased the joints. I don’t want to give any spoilers, but I promise you this: there are no ladders. No open windows. And absolutely no getaway scooters.
