Death of an Elgin Marble

This is the twelfth outing in the crime series by David Dickinson featuring aristocratic private eye Lord Francis Powerscourt and which I am ashamed to admit I have only just discovered in a roundabout way as a result of a recent online MOOCS course. This was about international art trafficking and theft and included an exercise on the pros and cons of returning the Elgin Marbles to Greece. Inspired by the course I’ve been looking for stories, both true and fictional, about the murky doings in the world of art and antiquities.
 
As it turns out though, there is much more going on in this investigation into how and why the Caryatid nicked by Lord Elgin from the Acropolis in Athens and now in the British Museum has been secretly replaced with a fake. Lord Powerscourt is called in to help with the mystery. When two BM porters come to sticky ends as does an apparently innocent Welsh teacher in the Brecon Beacons, things get really complicated.
 
The cast includes a mysterious American millionaire with a private sculpture gallery, a trio of dodgy art dealers who’ve done time in the Scrubs, an Edwardian version of the Kray Twins, a nervous undertaker, young people quoting Byron in a posh Hellenic School in leafy English suburbia, big boxes going in various directions by railway and a Greek ship transporting a circus. In spite of its often light style, the conclusion carries some interesting thoughts on when is a fake a fake and does it really matter.
 
Witty and bizarre - and occasionally just a wee bit too convoluted - it may be, but for the most part is highly entertaining. Even though I’m unfamiliar with the earlier titles in the series, there are not too many of those in-jokes or references to previous cases or characters that can put the uninitiated reader off. I particularly like the Lord’s wife, Lady Lucy, who quietly puts suggestions forward to her husband and Scotland Yard which had occurred to me too. Will definitely seek out the earlier titles in the series.  Four stars.

​(Image of the travelling lady here.)

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