Spec Thief Revealed

Controversy has swirled since author Jonathan Franzen’s (Freedom, The Corrections) famous glasses were stolen right off his even more famous mug at a book launch in London earlier this week. It turns out, however, that the truth is a lot less exciting than all the spec speculation might have led us to believe.

The culprit turned out to be James Fletcher, a 27-year-old post-grad from Liverpool who is, at present, studying computational aerospace design at Imperial College London. In an odd tell-all column for UK GQ, Fletcher tells of his drunken masterminding of the crime:

We stumbled across this event whilst in a cab on the way through to Kensington and when stopped at the door, not quite dressed for the occasion, a bit of wavy hand rhetoric was enough to let us through into the private party. We sat drinking excessive champagne for a while and talking to some of the guests there until I realised just how dull it all was. If you're going to gatecrash a party, the highlight of it surely can't consist of several predictable nervous speeches and vacuous conversations. So I decided to do something.

You can read more about what he did here. We previously covered the spec theft here.