A burglar’s guide to the city

Burglary loses any sense of architectural glamour when you call it home invasion or when you witness the violence of a smash and grab. Both the cops and the robbers I spoke to warned me about this; but still, it was all too easy to be seduced by mystic visions of slipping into buildings in ways no architect had ever imagined.

The burglars who hit my in-laws’ house thankfully did so when no one was home. They came in through the sliding glass doors at the back of the house—and the embarrassing thing about crime prevention is how predictable it all should have been in the first place, how you should have trusted your gut and made those changes, added those extra locks years ago, not because locks are unpickable but because they might have slowed the burglars down just enough to make them look elsewhere. My in-laws have an underlit backyard that is well fenced and heavily vegetated; it offers perfect cover to a group of burglars. Yet the house is also on a cul-de-sac (usually a deterrent), it backs up onto a frequently traveled road (another deterrent), and it is not located on anything like a grid, but deep in the winding streets of suburban England. All of that should have canceled out the high hedges and the sliding glass doors. And yet.

Absurdly, because the kids were exactly that—kids—they didn’t drive there. It’s England, after all, and commuter trains run right to the heart of this neighborhood from any point in London. The train station is also just a short walk from my in-laws’ house. I have walked it many times. This was finally it, I ironically realized: the perfect getaway. Not some jacked-up act of urban-scale hacking or a subterranean expedition leading halfway across Greater London: they just got on the train and went home again.

Because of their age, these burglars were also small. Some fourteen-year-olds are strong, of course, but not many want to carry, say, a plasma television or a large piece of framed art for several minutes through the center of town on their way to the nearest train station. Then to get on board the train, holding a bunch of unboxed appliances or a set of silverware, sweating, acting nervous, having to explain to anyone who asks where they got it all from. It might be a short ride back to London, but then you have to get off the train and start walking all over again—or hop on a bus, perhaps hike down a set of stairs or escalators to get on the tube, and it’s all too much to handle. It’s Kafka’s paradox all over again, but replayed with idiot teenagers incapable of figuring out how to bring their stolen goods home.

This means that nothing of real value was stolen from my in-laws—good news—just some random euros unspent from an earlier trip to the Continent and whatever else would fit into a backpack or pocket. But the angering pointlessness of it all doesn’t go away: the feeling that these kids—or others—will someday come back, the haunting unease that it might now be come one, come all for the region’s burglars. Your house is now a target, once and forever. Because of their age, you could not have done much about it even if you had caught them red-handed inside the house, perhaps just inflicted a few weekends’ worth of community service while they laughed and wondered about which house they might hit next.

Burglars, then, far from being interdimensional John McClanes of the built environment sliding through the many unseen topologies of Nakatomi space, are more like human mosquitoes: irritating, seemingly pointless, and unending in number. If only they really were the heroic explorers that this book seems so badly to want them to be. If only they really were Dr. Livingstones of the architectural world, hacking new paths through the dark continent of walls we’ve watched helplessly accumulate around us.

When Sky Thief Comes

I was not, however, alone in my delusions. Burglars have played a role as trickster figures in the public imagination for millennia, always finding unexpected ways into locked spaces or devilish new uses for objects in our midst. Visions of the ultimate burglar—an omnipotent, nearly supernatural bandit who can break into any building, pick any lock, slip through any barrier using ingenious tools indistinguishable from magic—ultimately serve as a kind of shared global folklore. Pop culture and urban myths around the world are already filled with such characters, as the sheer quantity of films referenced in this book makes clear.

The thirteenth-century German poem “Meier Helmbrecht,” for example, is a kind of Ronin tale from Old Europe in which corrupt knights form a thieves’ brigade—a medieval burglary crew—and amass their ill-gotten gains by conducting raids on foreign homes throughout the countryside. In the poem, we meet a man called Wolfsrüssel, a proto-superhero of Bogotá rakes:

Wolfsrüssel, he’s a man of skill

Without a key he bursts at will

The neatest-fastened iron box.

Within one year I’ve seen the locks

Of safes, at least a hundred such,

Spring wide ajar without a touch

At his approach! I can’t say how.

Stranger still, consider the pervasive medieval fear that witches armed with severed hands stolen from corpses—surely the eeriest burglary tool in this book—might try to break into your family’s home. As scholar Richard Kieckhefer points out in his history of magic in the Middle Ages, “using the hand of a dead person to break into a house” was seen as a talismanic way of warding off arrest or capture. Kieckhefer points out that entire spells, ceremonies, and ritual incantations were developed specifically for burglars to perform before approaching a house and breaking its close.

For example, the eleventh-century Book of Stones, written by Bishop Marbode of Rennes, advises how to use magnetized rocks and hot coals almost as a remote-control device for convincing people to leave their houses. Expose the coals to magnets in just the right way, and your targeted residents will simply abandon their homes in short order; you can walk right in and ransack the place. That Kieckhefer’s examples are sometimes a thousand years old—and that, even at the time, Bishop Marbode had suggested he was compiling much older folk traditions—speaks volumes about the enduring presence of burglary in Western society.

Even Kafka, we could say, bucking generations of literary interpretation, was really an author of heist novels. Two of his most famous pieces of writing—“Before the Law,” a short parable originally published as a chapter in The Trial, and the entirety of his novel The Castle—are focused on the specific challenge of obtaining entrance to a work of architecture. They are stories about breaking and entering. Whether this is achieved through long arguments of logic with a gatekeeper in “Before the Law,” or through conspiratorially gaining access to the city’s main palace in The Castle, Kafka’s characters are, in a technical sense, failed burglars.