Word: crimeeds
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...gallery in St. Petersburg or a secret room in the mansion of J.P. Morgan. In fact, she had never left Paris. The thief turned out to be Vincenzo Peruggia - the Hooblers spell it Perugia - an Italian house painter and carpenter living in France, though he was arrested for the crime - in December 1913 - in Florence. He had gone there with the painting after contacting a Florentine art dealer, Alfredo Geri, who he hoped would help him dispose of his hostage in a way that would bring him some cash. Geri played along, and even brought in the director...
...this is fun to imagine, but garbage. Almost a century after the crime, none of the six alleged copies has turned up. Did de Valfierno even exist, or was he a fiction created by Decker in his declining years to sell a magazine story? Who knows, but all these years later, authors with a book to market still play footsie with Decker's wholly unsubstantiated story. The Hooblers retell the Decker tale in their last chapter, then lamely attach a disclaimer: "There is no external confirmation for it. Yet it has frequently been assumed to be true by authors writing...
...Scotti does with the story is no better. She opens Vanished Smile with the Marqués arriving in the U.S. to peddle his forgeries, a gimmick that will lead unsuspecting readers to suppose that this imaginary character will somehow turn out to be the real man behind the crime. But the Marqués disappears from her book until the final chapter, where Scotti lays out Decker's account and then details the reasons why it's probably hooey...
...then there's The Mentalist. CBS's latest crime procedural, starring hunky Simon Baker as phony psychic turned sleuth Patrick Jane, is not just the biggest new hit of the season; it is arguably the only new hit of the season. It reliably draws huge audiences, even in weeks when it has run against American Idol - as many as 20 million viewers, nearly double the audience of the nearest new contender, Fox's Fringe. (See the top 10 TV series...
This is CBS's audience - sometimes older, sometimes not, but generally more conservative in its tastes - and the network serves these people perfectly. While competitors make TV to court fickle viewers distracted by video games and the Internet, CBS - with crime shows like NCIS and sitcoms like Two and a Half Men - makes TV for people who like television. (How old school is The Mentalist? You can't even watch it online...