Publishing History

• Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1962
• London: Cassell, 1963

Summary

   David Dodge returns to the scene of his greatest triumph, the South of France, for his seventh travel book, The Rich Man’s Guide to the Riviera. Less a “guide” and more a series of anecdotes and witty tales of the Dodges’ time in France, this book starts out with a recounting of the genesis of To Catch a Thief (Random House, 1951). In 1950, they had arrived on the Côte d’Azur after several years in South America and moved into a furnished villa on a hill above Golfe-Juan, near Cannes. Before they were even fully settled in, they deposited Kendal in a girls’ boarding school in Cannes and David and Elva left for Italy on a magazine assignment. Simultaneous with their departure, the villa next door was robbed of a quarter of a million dollars worth of jewelry and the mysterious, vanishing American was made the prime suspect. After they returned—and the actual thief had been caught—and learned that David had been the subject of an intense, if brief, manhunt, Dodge “saw in the combination a fiction which was, for once, so much stranger than truth that it cried out to be immortalized between hard covers.” The resulting book, To Catch a Thief, was “the easiest eighty thousand words ever put together.” The international success of the book, and the Alfred Hitchcock film that soon followed, along with the devalued French monetary system, resulted in Dodge becoming, for the first time in his life, a rich man, a multi-millionaire in fact—in francs. The book also presents lively discussions of various features of the Riviera, such as gambling, nude beaches, smuggling, the Cannes film festival, the ubiquitous bikini, and Princess Grace.