![]() I’d be very sympathetic one day, other days thinking he’s just a con artist.”ĭespite the aristocratic air of his name, Smiley grew up in the 1960s and ’70s in middle-class suburbs of New Hampshire. “There’s a dichotomy at the center of his character,” Blanding says, adding that his own feelings about Smiley wavered. ![]() ![]() Yet he also chose to pour most of his ill-gotten gains into a quixotic attempt to preserve a tiny New England fishing village.Įven Blanding, who conducted the only in-depth interviews with Smiley, found it impossible to pin down many absolute truths, the author told Paste in a recent interview. ![]() He proves perverse enough to join a librarian friend at an exhibit, mutually admiring a map he himself stole from her own collection. Elusive and evasive, the crook is by turns scheming and tragic, greedy and romantic. The Map Thief, journalist Michael Blanding’s new book about the Smiley case, unfolds as a real-life thriller about this map-dealer turned map-stealer.īut if you come for the detective story, you’ll stay for the novel-worthy character of Smiley. The investigation into the scope and motives of this eccentric rogue’s crimes, however, was only beginning. When a librarian at Yale noticed the X-acto knife blade laying on the floor in 2005, the peculiar criminal career of Edward Forbes Smiley III-perhaps the world’s most prolific thief of antique maps-met its doom. ![]()
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