The Blackest Bird
by Joel Rose
Canogate, HK$165
Readers of The Blackest Bird may recognise in the depiction of 1840s New York scenes from Martin Scorsese's 2002 movie. That's because Joel Rose began his research for this historical novel with Herbert Asbury's 1927 book, Gangs of New York. Among the gangsters, grave robbers, louche writers and greedy publishers that fill his hefty novel is a motley bunch of real-life characters, including Edgar Allen Poe, whose story The Mystery of Marie Roget inspired Rose's reworking of history about the death of the 'beautiful segar [cigar] girl'. So full of facts that it stumbles under their weight, The Blackest Bird posits that Poe might have had more to do with the death of the tobacco shop employee than he let on in his writing. Rose enmeshes the story with several other crimes, including that of the poet John Colt (brother of revolver manufacturer Samuel), sentenced to death for murdering and mutilating his publisher Samuel Adams. The most morally decent in the lineup is Jacob Hays, High Constable of New York City, although the tracts involving him are also the most tedious, as he and his daughter dissect Poe's book to ascertain his guilt. Rose took 17 years to finish this book. It might have taken a fraction of that time had he figured out how to manage fact and fiction.