Every Picture Tells a Story

by Gregory Dowling

After artist and sometime forger Martin Phipps sees by accident a photograph of a painting stolen from a Venice museum, two Italian thugs interrogate him at his London studio before setting it ablaze

375 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Gregory Dowling grew up in Bristol, UK. He studied English Literature at Christ Church, Oxford. He moved to Italy after graduating and has lived there since 1979, teaching in language schools in Naples, Siena, Verona and eventually Venice, where he has lived since 1981. He is now Associate Professor of American Literature at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. He published four thrillers in the 1980s and 1990s and then devoted himself to academic work and translation. He returned to fiction in 2015, with his novel set in 18th-century Venice, Ascension, and the sequel The Four Horsemen in 2017 (the Alvise Marangon Mysteries).
His academic work mainly concerns British and American poetry; he has published a study of American narrative poetry, a study of the poet David Mason, a guidebook to Byron's Venice and has co-edited two anthologies of 20th-century poetry. He has also published numerous essays and articles on writers from the Romantic period to the present day. He was non-fiction editor for the magazine Able Muse for several years and is responsible for the British section of the Italian poetry magazine Semicerchio. He has also written numerous articles on Venice, and was responsible for the sightseeing pages of the first five editions of the Time Out Guide to Venice. He is on the board of the committee for a new museum in Ravenna devoted to Lord Byron, due to open in 2019.

Reviews

[Pam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yup. I do like Mr Dwoling's writing ... and making mystery stories.. Goody good

[Nancy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is almost a 4. It is a novel about art - forged art and stolen art. The main character has just been released from prison for forging paintings. He heads to Venice because he suspects that some paintings have been stolen. The book is rich in Venice and art details but I found it hard to follow in some places. I would have liked to have a map of Venice and a small Italian/Venetian dialect glossary. But the end got exciting