How many Albert Halls does it take to fill a hole?

NO these buildings are not in a Police ID line-up so that an eye-witness can identify which one committed the deed.* That would be silly and would compromise the hard-won Riddled reputation for research excellence. It is simply for ease of re-uniting each one with its rightful owner.

We are seeing more of these line-ups these days, for which I blame the vogue for memory palaces. Some cartoonish super-villain reads The Art of Memory or The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci and thinks "What a cool way of enhancing my already encyclopaedic recall; how can I acquire an array of memory loci in a hurry for my mental look-up table?" And before you can say "flange", Chartres Cathedral and the Hermitage and all the rest are piling up hugger-mugger and nolens-volens in some tropical island volcano base, while tourism bureaux dash around to erect maintenance scaffoldry to veil the embarrassing lacunae that they previously inhabited.

No sooner is one kidnapping program thwarted and one mnemonic collection dispersed, then some other genius stumbles upon the same idea. Fortunately for the world's architectural patrimony, there is always a flaw somewhere in the scheme of every cartoonish criminal mastermind no matter how ingenious, and they are inevitably caught. It must be a tradition, or an old charter or something. Every plan is brought down by a monumental blunder.

Once all the famous buildings have been purloined a couple of times it becomes incrementally easier to purloin them again. This on account of Rupert Sheldrake's theory of Morphic Resonance fields. Making Sheldrake a criminal accessory, and he has indeed been arraigned as such, only to have the jury dismiss the charge when they found that he was not a faux-fur handbag.

The self-proclaimed "Wrenegade" specialised in collecting churches from one particular architect.


Then there was the "Fly of Memory" who had the notion of absconding with his ill-gotten memory loci to Mars, outside the reach of repatriation treaties. He did not reckon with the Monumental Crimes Unit and their capacity for paperwork maneuvering and almost inexhaustible supply of 14C/b6 forms for overtime approval (to be countersigned by immediate supervisor and line managers).

Must credit Ptak Books and Feuilleton for images!

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* The perpetrator is always the pyramid, but at Riddled we do not stoop to stereotypes or profiling.