Paint, Gold and Blood
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 the prestigious 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.
Overview
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, eventually 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 his years, is nearly murdered in a darkened French church in the first few pages but makes his way to another familiar Gilbert setting, the English boarding school, where he is joined for many somewhat tedious 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 paintings is another Gilbert standby, as well as his faithful and extremely tough French retainers who tend to the 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 finally, as usual in Gilbert books, there is a violent climax, this time in two settings, one at a Paris airport, the other on the Gironde river in Bordeaux, with the violence all the more shocking because of its unexpectedness.