I write the Anastasia Pollack Crafting Mysteries, a cozy mystery series featuring a reluctant amateur sleuth who works as a crafts editor at a women’s magazine. The thirteenth and latest book in the series, Sorry, Knot Sorry, is a June 2024 release.

 I’m also a news junkie, with current events and human-interest stories inspiring most of the plots and/or subplot in my books. However, for Guilty as Framed, the eleventh book in the series, I veered from being inspired by an actual crime to creating a plot that revolves around an actual crime.

 I fell in love with the paintings of Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn as a teenager when I first walked through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. From that day on, I spent many hours seated in front of my favorite of his paintings, Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer. I even wrote a paper on the painting my senior year of high school.

 Because of my love of Rembrandt’s works, I was devastated when the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was burglarized in 1990. Three of the thirteen works of art stolen were by Rembrandt. These included his only seascape, “Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee,” a painting that was nearly five-and-a-half-feet tall, and the postage-stamp sized etching “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” featured on the cover of Guilty as Framed.

 I followed the investigation as it unfolded and have read countless articles on this still unsolved crime. I’ve also watched several documentaries about the burglary and the efforts to find both the perpetrators and the missing artworks. Thirty-four years later, it’s still considered the largest art heist in history. To this day, not only haven’t the perpetrators been caught, but none of the artworks have ever been recovered. Many of the witnesses and persons of interest have since died, some of natural causes, and at least one of not-so-natural causes.

 In Guilty as Framed, I wanted to incorporate the actual museum burglary and the missing artworks into the plot of the book. This gave me quite a challenge. I had to figure out how to connect a decades-old museum heist in Boston to my humorous New Jersey-set cozy series.

 Writing fiction rather than true crime allowed me to invent some new characters, change the names of real persons (to protect the innocent and not-so-innocent), and weave various events from the actual crime into the plot of Guilty as Framed.

 “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” is also known as “Rembrand Aux Trois Moustaches.” For those of you who don’t speak French, that translates to “Rembrandt with Three Moustaches.” How could a man have three moustaches? One prevailing theory suggests that the second “moustache” is his beard and the third is the fur on his cap. However, I’ve never heard of a beard being called a moustache, and the cap “moustache” seems quite a stretch. Perhaps “Rembrandt with a Moustache, a Beard, and a Furry Caterpillar on his Cap” would have made more sense.

 Rembrandt was a serious artist, though. He never displayed a sense of humor in any of his paintings or in the titles of them. It seems unlikely the three-moustache title came from him. Most likely, he titled the etching “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” as so many of his early self-portraits, or possibly “Self-Portrait Wearing a Soft Cap.”

 “Rembrandt Aux Trois Moustaches” is a mystery within the mystery of the heist. I knew I had to explore that in my story. I began researching and discovered the tiny etching was purchased for Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1886 from the art dealer Frederick Keppel & Co., who listed the etching as such on the sales invoice. Was the three-moustache title his idea of a joke? We’ll never know.

 Finally, and most unfortunately, my research didn’t lead to the discovery of the missing artworks, which is a shame because there’s still a huge outstanding reward for information leading to their recovery.

 But what does this miniature Rembrandt self-portrait have to do with Anastasia Pollack? You’ll get no spoilers from me. For an answer to that mystery, you’re going to have to read Guilty as Framed.