The Giant's Sword is a locked room mystery short story by Joseph Commings, featuring his fictional detective Brooks U. Banner. It was the last Banner story published in Mystery Digest .
The story begins in the Quartermaine Art Gallery on 57th Street, New York City. Mrs. Estelle Whitelake buys Franz Hals' The Looten Family. She buys the picture, and rushes it to an art expert. The art expert first tries to explain that Franz Hals did not paint such a picture, but eventually admits it is genuine. Estelle Whitelake pays $75,000 for the painting, and has it delivered to her apartment in Venice Court. Whitelake regularly brags about the painting, flaunting it to her friends, writing seven page letters to her son serving in the Marines about it. One day, she brings over several friends, including her art expert, who tells her the painting is a different one then the one he saw, and is a fake.
Senator Banner is playing pool in a dingy pool hall, when a phone call comes in. The call is from Estelle, who begs Banner to come with her to see Mark Quartermaine, at 111 Coldrige Crescent. Banner agrees to meet Estelle there.
Quarteriane's house is a two-story house, surrounded by trees on all sides. Estelle leads Banner inside to meet Quartermaine's secretary Olive Culpepper, who doesn't know where Paul DeQueen (Quartermaine's agent) is, but knows where Quartermaine is. Quartermaine is in his trophy room, a room with axes and coats of armor, and tapestries everywhere. It has one door in, and a window on the other end of the room, that is right beside the garage. Lying behind the oak wood desk is Quartermaine, with a huge sword driven through him, with no blood coming out of him.
Olive shrieks as Quartermaine is found, screaming they were going to be married. Banner gets Estelle to take Olive out of the room, and then he calls the police. DeQueen rushes into the room, through the door, and explains the sword is a Scottish claymore sword, that was supposed to hang on the wall. The sword is to large and heavy to be lifted by any one man who was not incredibly strong, and couldn't have been driven that deep into the body, no matter how strong they are. Banner gets every one in to rehearse their story. Olive said she went to see Quartermaine right before Banner showed up, and heard a shoe scrape outside the window, or at least a scrape of stiff leather, but no one was looking in the window. The sword was still on the wall.
The medical examiner looks over the body, and says the problem is, that the sword is very dull, couldn't have been driven very far, yet went through Quartermaine's ribs like a knife through butter. With the way the sword was thrust, only a giant could have done it. Banner gets a call from Quartermaine's lawyer Eddystone, who reveals the only people who benefited from his death are Olive, DeQueen, and Estelle. Banner goes out, and sees the only car owned by Quartermaine is a Volkswagen. Banner asks Olive how many miles to the gallon Quartermaine got, and she says 20. Banner then goes to a nearby gas station, where it is revealed Quartermaine got his car filled up, and didn't drive anywhere but home, but another gallon of gas is missing. Banner finds out that in a 20-mile radius, there is only one art gallery, Porthaven, owned by Mr. Morgan. Morgan reveals he bought The Looten Family from Quartermaine's agent DeQueen for $75,000.
Banner gathers Estelle, and tells her there were two paintings, a real and a fake. Estelle bought the real one, but DeQueen switched it with a fake one while delivering it to her house. DeQueen also killed Quartermaine. DeQueen sneaked into the trophy room, through the window, so he wouldn't be seen. He then lured Quartermaine alone, into the garage. While Quartermaine was there, DeQueen took the sword, tied it to the hood of the Volkswagen, and drove the spearhead through Quartermaine, as he opened the garage. DeQueen then untied the sword, and dragged Quartermaines body into the trophy room.
In Greek mythology, Pyramus and Thisbe are a pair of ill-fated lovers from Babylon, whose story is best known from Ovid's narrative poem Metamorphoses. The tragic myth has been retold by many authors.
Palace of Fontainebleau, located 55 kilometers southeast of the center of Paris, in the commune of Fontainebleau, is one of the largest French royal châteaux. It served as a hunting lodge and summer residence for many of the French monarchs, including Louis VII, Francis I, Henry II, Louis-Philippe, Napoleon I, and Napoleon III. Though the monarchs only resided there for a few months of the year, they gradually transformed it into a genuine palace, filled with art and decoration. It became a national museum in 1927 and was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981 for its unique architecture and historical importance.
The Three Musketeers is a French historical adventure novel written in 1844 by French author Alexandre Dumas. It is the first of the author's three d'Artagnan Romances. As with some of his other works, he wrote it in collaboration with ghostwriter Auguste Maquet. It is in the swashbuckler genre, which has heroic, chivalrous swordsmen who fight for justice.
Las Meninas is a 1656 painting in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, by Diego Velázquez, the leading artist of the Spanish Baroque. It has become one of the most widely analyzed works in Western painting for the way its complex and enigmatic composition raises questions about reality and illusion, and for the uncertain relationship it creates between the viewer and the figures depicted.
Ascott House, sometimes referred to as simply Ascott, is a Grade II* listed building in the hamlet of Ascott near Wing in Buckinghamshire, England. It is set in a 32-acre / 13 hectare estate.
Thomas Patrick Keating was an English artist, art restorer and art forger. Considered the most prolific and versatile art forger of the 20th century, he claimed to have faked more than 2,000 paintings by more than 160 different artists of unprecedented scope—ranging from the Renaissance to Modernism, Expressionism and Fauvism —with heavy emphasis on English landscape Romanticists and the French Impressionists. Total estimated profits from his forgeries amount in today's value to more than $10 million.
Dogs Playing Poker, by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, refers collectively to an 1894 painting, a 1903 series of sixteen oil paintings commissioned by Brown & Bigelow to advertise cigars, and a 1910 painting. All eighteen paintings in the overall series feature anthropomorphized dogs, but the eleven in which dogs are seated around a card table have become well known in the United States as examples of kitsch art in home decoration.
The Starry Night is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh, painted in June 1889. It depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of an imaginary village. It has been in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City since 1941, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. Widely regarded as Van Gogh's magnum opus, The Starry Night is one of the most recognizable paintings in Western art.
F for Fake is a 1973 docudrama film co-written, directed by, and starring Orson Welles who worked on the film alongside François Reichenbach, Oja Kodar, and Gary Graver. Initially released in 1974, it focuses on Elmyr de Hory's recounting of his career as a professional art forger; de Hory's story serves as the backdrop for a meandering investigation of the natures of authorship and authenticity, as well as the basis of the value of art. Far from serving as a traditional documentary on de Hory, the film also incorporates Welles's companion Oja Kodar, hoax biographer Clifford Irving and Orson Welles as himself. F for Fake is sometimes considered an example of a film essay.
The Centre Block is the main building of the Canadian parliamentary complex on Parliament Hill, in Ottawa, Ontario, containing the House of Commons and Senate chambers, as well as the offices of a number of members of parliament, senators, and senior administration for both legislative houses. It is also the location of several ceremonial spaces, such as the Hall of Honour, the Memorial Chamber, and Confederation Hall.
Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum, formerly The Smith Institute, is an art and local history museum in Stirling, Scotland. The museum was founded in 1874 at the bequest of artist Thomas Stuart Smith.
The Royal Collection of the British royal family is the largest private art collection in the world.
Robert Peake the Elder was an English painter active in the later part of Elizabeth I's reign and for most of the reign of James I. In 1604, he was appointed picture maker to the heir to the throne, Prince Henry; and in 1607, serjeant-painter to King James I – a post he shared with John De Critz.
The portraiture of Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) spans the evolution of English royal portraits in the early modern period (1400/1500-1800), from the earliest representations of simple likenesses to the later complex imagery used to convey the power and aspirations of the state, as well as of the monarch at its head.
Fourteen Rembrandt paintings are held in collections in Southern California. This accumulation began with J. Paul Getty's purchase of the Portrait of Marten Looten in 1938, and is now the third-largest concentration of Rembrandt paintings in the United States. Portrait of Marten Looten is now housed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
The Books of Elsewhere is a series of fantasy novels for kids and young teens by Jacqueline West that centers on the McMartins' house on Linden Street, which has many magical paintings.
"Fionna and Cake" is the ninth episode of the third season of the American animated television series Adventure Time. The episode was written and storyboarded by Adam Muto and Rebecca Sugar, from a story by Mark Banker, Kent Osborne, Patrick McHale, and series creator Pendleton Ward. It originally aired on Cartoon Network on September 5, 2011.
M. Knoedler & Co. was an art dealership in New York City founded in 1846. When it closed in 2011, amid lawsuits for fraud, it was one of the oldest commercial art galleries in the US, having been in operation for 165 years.
Wolfgang Beltracchi is a German former art forger and visual artist who has admitted to forging hundreds of paintings in an international art scam netting millions of euros. Beltracchi, together with his wife Helene, sold forgeries of alleged works by famous artists, including Max Ernst, Heinrich Campendonk, Fernand Léger, and Kees van Dongen. Though he was found guilty for forging 14 works of art that sold for a combined $45m (£28.6m), he claims to have faked "about 50" artists. The total estimated profits Beltracchi made from his forgeries surpasses $100m.
Saint Amelia, Queen of Hungary is an oil painting by Paul Delaroche which was investigated in 2016 by the BBC TV programme Fake or Fortune?