Paint, Gold and Blood

(CC) Photo: Jerry Bauer
Michael Gilbert on the back cover of Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens, 1982

Authors [about]: Hayford Peirce and others. CZ is an open collaboration. Please join in to develop this article!

Paint, Gold and Blood is a 1989 suspense novel by the British mystery and thriller writer Michael Gilbert, published in England by Hodder and Stoughton and in the United States by Harper & Row. Although it was Gilbert's 25th novel and his immediately previous books had been favorably reviewed, it was the last of his books to be published by Harper & Row and it was not reviewed by The New York Times, Kirkus Reviews, or Publishers Weekly. All American editions of his books were thereafter published by smaller, less well-known houses.

Plot

Written with Gilbert's usual urbane and understated style, the events take place in various parts of both England and France. It begins in the Médoc wine-producing area of Bordeaux, moves quickly to southwestern England near the English Channel, then to London, and from there back and forth to France, with a side trip to Belgium. Unusual for Gilbert, a London solicitor who generally set at least or two scenes in a courtroom or lawyer's office, Paint has none of these but does offer a rich assortment of other themes and characters from Gilbert's many years of writing successful fiction. A typical Gilbert teenager, intelligent and resourceful beyond is years, is nearly murdered in the first few pages but makes his way to another familiar Gilbert setting, the English boarding school, where he joined for many pages by an even more clever teenage boy and a resourceful girl. The overall theme of the book eventually becomes apparent: an ingenious (and frequently murderous) long-standing scheme to smuggle stolen paintings out of France and into South America by a disparate group of dealers, painters, and deadly Iranians. As a consequence of the Iranian revolution, however, there is also another group of equally villainous Irans jostling our youthful protagonists and blowing up innocent bystanders, as well as some of Gilbert's usual highly competent police officials of various nationalities. A wealthy English gentleman with a château in the Médoc full of valuable painting is another Gilbert standby, as well as the faithful and extremely tough French retainers who tend to his property. Unlike most Gilbert books, however, there seems to be no overall focus to the events in the story, which cover at least a four-year period; there is the quiet boarding school with its subterranean underplotting; London art galleries; cunning bankers and unscrupulous art dealers; harrowing suspense as various villains prepare to do their worst; amazing escapes and coincidences—everything in Gilbert's enormous bag of tricks makes its appearance. And, of course, most of the villains come to highly unpleasant ends while the three youthful protagonists and a handful of their more elderly something

Unusual for a Gilbert novel, it is difficult to immediately discern its direction. It begins along typical Gilbert lines with its 16-year-old protagonist, Peter Dolamore, on a bicycle trip along the north coast of France during the Easter holidays from his boarding school in England. Having grown up with his French mother in Paris for his first 11 years he is perfectly bilingual in both French and English. He has just spent a uncomfortable few days at the château of a wealthy Englishman who has a vineyard and an extensive art collection in the Médoc area of Bordeaux—the Englishman is the uncle of Lisa Shilling, an attractive girl who is a close friend of Peter's at his boarding school and who has arranged Peter's visit. Returning by bicycle to Dieppe to catch his return ferry to England, however, he is nearly murdered by two Iranian art thieves in an ancient church on the coast who are engaged in stealing a valuable triptych from a tomb behind which Peter has concealed himself in the dark. Barely escaping, he returns to the modest hotel in which he has spent the previous night; with the aid of a perhaps overly friendly girl at the hotel and of her brother, a French police detective, he is driven to Dieppe and returns to England without further incident. The detective tells him on the way that as the result of the 1979 revolution in Iran there are now many Iranians of different political factions in France, all with competing goals and powerful patrons, and that a policeman's life is thereby complicated. All of this takes up only the first 12 pages of the book.

Another familiar Gilbert setting, the English boarding school, takes up the next 57 pages and about six months in time. Gilbert himself was educated at St. Peters in Seaford (1920–1926), and Blundell's School in Tiverton (1926–1931). For financial reasons, he later became a schoolmaster for a number of years before World War II at the Salisbury Cathedral School, and British schools, both public and private, upper-class and working class, figure many times in his fiction. Chelborough, the school to which Peter returns for his final year, is the standard sort of private school for middle- and upper-class English boys and girls, and it is here that he and his closest friend, Steward Ives, spend the next few months first uncovering, and then rectifying a monetary swindle that the Reverend Mr. Brind, the head of their particular School House, has been working for a number of years to the detriment of a working-class Mission in London that should have been receiving the funds. The means by which they do this are exceedingly clever (particularly for two teen-age boys), exceedingly dangerous for their standing at school, and exceedingly tedious for the reader. Nearly all of Gilbert's schoolboys over the many decades that he wrote about them seem to be more clever, insightful, and mature than we might expect them to be. But in this particular case, the many pages devoted to their cleverness seems to exist for the sole purpose of showing us just how brave and resourceful they will be when the story resumes its normal course of being a standard suspense novel three or years in their future.

And, three years later, Gilbert's characters are once being tested in the standard ways. Steward, the ingenious one, has founded a profitable astrological scam that is successful enough to bring in Peter as a junior member. Peter and Lisa Shilling are now living together happily while Peter tries to find a job that can support himself in addition to Lisa's work with a shady art dealer. Coincidences build up, suspicion is spread around, sympathetic characters find themselves in risky situations, and murderous Irans on both sides are busy killing one another and, in one case, half a dozen innocent bystanders at a Parisian café. A competent and affable upper-level Gilbertian policeman makes his appearance, Commissaire Meurice of the Brigade Criminelle of the Bordeaux Judiciaire. Peter has made another brief visit to the château in which his adventures had begun, and the Commissaire has asked for his help in the non-forgotten theft of the church's triptych and subsequent murder of yet another innocent bystander.