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Let’s just say this: Elmore Leonard, now going on 84 years old, is still cranking out perfectly detailed, thrilling, and hilarious stories of criminals at a pace that’s hard to believe.

Photos by Ed Zipco

Located in the heart of Le Marais, the poshest gay area in all of France, Crédit Municipal is the closet thing to a Parisian pawnshop you can find. It’s run by the city because private pawnbrokering is illegal.

Pawnshops are found in prime locations throughout Stockholm, but most have teensy, dreadful offices. We visited one of the larger chains, Pantbanken Sverige, and caught up with CEO Peter Sundström.

The most recent store opening coincided with an uptick in the poor-people-selling-their-cherished-belongings business.

The process is careful, thorough, and loaded with ritualistic bearing—in addition to memorializing lost pals and family members, it’s an equally restorative, if macabre, ceremony for those who remain.

This past spring North Korea test-fired yet another Taepodong missile over Japan. It was the third such launch in just over a decade.

This is how the glorified pawnshop works, according to José Luis Arregín, the broker: Money-strapped clients hock their stuff for half its value in cash.

Who lives better: anarchist punks or plutocrats? We forced our writers to find out.

We were disappointed when the pawnshop we visited in Amsterdam wasn’t some seedy box in the red-light district with a mean old coot slouching behind his desk and patting the shotgun on his lap.

Pawnshops in Canada aren’t all that different from those in the US, but for whatever reason finding a chatty pawnbroker was like chiseling a dead body out of concrete.

In 1979, Werner Herzog approached 20th Century Fox to fund a movie, based on a true story, about an overzealous rubber baron who wishes to stage an opera in the middle of the Peruvian Amazon.