Mr. Wheels and the Island of Bandits

A great fan franchise, comparable to the British Sherlock Holmes and the French Inspector Maigret, the Polish Mr, Wheels, the bumbling art detective with his iconic self-built car, has been solving art mysteries for sixty years. The humorous tales with a delightful procession of quirky characters concern theft and fraud in the art world and the villains are usually gentlemen (and gentlewomen) thieves. And usually, there is a great historical tale in the background.

In this, the third book in the series, we turn to the first adventure of the Intrepid Art Detective, Mr. Wheels.

In 1961, fifteen years after the end of World War II, the wounds of war are still fresh, including those inflicted by a gang of marauders commanded by a bandit nicknamed Barabas. Following the fall of the Third Reich and taking advantage of the period of instability that existed for months, Barabas and his villains terrorized the countryside from a base of operations on an island on the Vistula, 70 miles north of Warsaw. They were eventually captured and imprisoned and this put an end to their robberies; but even from their prisons, the gangsters’ tentacles still reach back to their old base to guard the Dunin Treasure they had buried somewhere in the area. And now, several mysterious agents compete to unearth the treasure and solve the mysteries of the Island of Bandits and we are introduced to several characters who will become a permanent fixture in the series.

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