The intrepid jewel thief has always been an iconic figure in literature and cinema. From E.W Hornung’s Raffles, the gentleman burglar, to Cary Grant’s super-larcenist (“The Cat”) in Hitchcock’s 1955 comedy-thriller To Catch a Thief, he exists in a category far removed from other common criminals. Perhaps a descendant of the romanticized figure of Robin Hood, the diamond stealer is reputed only to take from the very, very wealthy, and if he’s using the purloined money for his own comfort rather than giving it to the poor, then that’s surely a fitting reward for the daring and ingenuity that he’s displayed in his raids. As Grant remarks in To Catch a Thief, “I never stole from anybody who would go hungry.”
Rena Pederson uses that line as the opening epigraph of her intriguing and highly readable true-crime thriller The King of Diamonds. Pederson, a journalist who is not above marketing herself using the awards and high-profile interviews and accolades that no doubt beget one another, sets about investigating a series of unsolved jewelry thefts that took place in Dallas throughout the ‘60s and led to their perpetrator being described, admiringly, as the eponymous king. “Right away, I learned that burglars who steal jewels have a special mystique. Even in prisons, ‘second-story men’ are considered a cut above ordinary burglars,” Pederson writes. “In my own way, I was as unassuming as Agatha Christie’s rumpled Miss Marple, but without the hat and knitting. And as mystery readers know, it’s always a mistake to underestimate someone who seems ordinary.”
The series of heists in question almost exclusively took place from the homes of Texas oil millionaires, whose younger trophy wives were adorned with fabulous amounts of jewelry by their husbands, such as Herbert “Bwana” Klein, an oil magnate and self-described “World’s Greatest Big Game Hunter.” Pederson notes that he “collected more than 650 game trophies, becoming the only man to kill one of every wild animal species in the North American continent — some that were later extinct. He shot wolves, mongooses, fifteen species of owls, even a rare Mongolian argal.” He was duly relieved of some of his smaller, more portable trophies, and the newspapers breathlessly reported every detail. It comes as little surprise that, by the early ‘60s, the King of Diamonds’s renown was such that children were even dressing up like him for Halloween as if he were Batman or Superman.
Certainly, the loot that the regal thief made off with was impressive. Pederson writes of one especially valuable trinket, “When one of the detectives heard how big the center stone was, he whistled and said, ‘That’s not a diamond, that’s a skating rink!’” Yet the plutocrats’ playground had a dark side. Dallas was a city riven by poverty and discrimination. As Pederson observes, “Bank accounts segregated the city like race.”
At the highest level were men who had too much money and sought to alleviate boredom with ever-grander displays of extravagance. They bet fortunes on trivialities, such as the weather, whether an attractive girl would look in their direction, or, on one occasion, how fast a waiter would come to the table. They drank heavily, cheated on their wives, betrayed one another in business, and treated anyone not in their social circles with contempt. It is hard not to feel that they deserved to be robbed, and robbed blind.
The book is most successful in its character sketches of these loathsome plutocrats, and Pederson’s writing is at its sharpest describing their activities, as when she says of one fellow that “he was the kind of man who looked as if he slept in a tuxedo and, some evenings, did.” It is weaker when she attempts to place the antics of the King of Diamonds into the wider milieu of the organized crime scene in ‘60s Dallas. At times, this seems to be aiming for an L.A. Confidential-esque sweep in its depiction of a morally lacking town where everyone is on the take, but Pederson is no James Ellroy. Still, there are well-drawn cameos of some of those involved in the case, such as the straight-shooting detective Walter Fannin (“a Fifties kind of guy in a Sixties world”) and his adopted daughter, who goes by the marvelous name Delores Letart. How Damon Runyon and Raymond Chandler would have killed, or stolen, to call a character that.
Pederson’s investigation winds up with a plausible theory of who was responsible for the thefts and why they managed to avoid capture during their lifetime, which leads to a satisfying conclusion to her book. But the richer pleasure to be had along the way lies less in the detective work that she undertakes and more in the evocation of a bygone era of concealed subterranean gambling dens and the endemic corruption of a country in which an oil magnate had none other than J. Edgar Hoover on his payroll, to be pressed into service whenever he needed him. Reading The King of Diamonds is like taking a long bath in oil. You may enjoy the strange, all-enveloping sensation while it occurs, but you’ll need a shower to wash away the filth afterward.
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Alexander Larman is the author of, most recently, Power and Glory and is an editor at the Spectator World.