Anglo-American thirty-something Watkins' seventh novel is a superior thriller, written in dispassionate, meat-and-potatoes, toughguy prose, inviting immediate comparison with faux-Hemingway terseness, and also presenting a somewhat Hemingway-esque situation.
The young American painter David Halifax finds himself studying in pre-second World War Paris, courtesy of a scholarship he never applied for from an organisation he never heard of, called the Levasseur Committee. This is eventually revealed as a front cooked up by Pankratov, Halifax's socially maladroit but brilliant Russian emigre teacher, and his cafe-owning buddy Ivan, who served with Halifax's uncle in the Foreign Legion. Installed in Pankratov's atelier, along with affectless model Valya, our hero soon falls in with Fleury, a successful art dealer. Fleury, who has an unrequited passion for Valya, starts passing off Halifax's museum studies as Old Master sketches. Halifax quickly overcomes his qualms about this arrangement, needing the money to prolong his stay when his funding runs out.
Everything becomes more intense with the Nazi occupation. Halifax is embroiled in a bid to foil German attempts to expropriate French art treasures. Posing as collaborationist art thieves, Halifax and Fleury trade forgeries of Renaissance paintings for "decadent" art the invaders would otherwise burn.
Pankratov is revealed as a master forger, and Valya, who turns out to be his adopted daughter, gets involved with the ruthless SS man in charge of the Nazi art mission. Halifax and Fleury secure a final commission to "locate" Vermeer's The Astronomer for Goering. Pankratov and his protege duly come up with the goods. For fans of conspiracy theories everywhere.
Desmond Traynor is a writer and critic