Feather mystery tied up in flies
Edwin Rist’s modus operandi wasn’t exactly Crime of the Century stuff: smash a window, climb in, grab as much loot as possible then make a slow getaway on foot and by train. What made his crime stand out was the place he burgled: not a bank or an art gallery, but Britain’s Natural History Museum. And what he took: bird skins.
Two hundred and ninety nine bird skins — 47 Indian crows, 17 flame bowerbirds, 37 king birds of paradise, 39 resplendent quetzals … a mixed bag with a common link: gorgeous feathers.
When the case finally made it to court — largely through luck — Rist’s defence was that he was a naive 20-year-old unable to resist a powerful obsession.
The music student had a precocious talent for tying fishing flies. Not just any fishing flies but elaborate salmon flies made precisely to designs laid out in the Victorian era.
To make them, Rist needed exactly the same — and now very rare — feathers the Victorians used. This may not be an everyday obsession but it’s shared by enough people to make a single skin of some rare birds worth thousands of dollars and even a few feathers can fetch a hundred or two.
Kirk Wallace Johnson suspects there may be more to the story than naivete and goes digging.
He dives back into the 19th century, when some of the stolen birds were collected by the great naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace.
He tries to penetrate the decidedly odd world of competitive fly tying. He pursues Rist. Was he really was as innocent as he claimed or a calculating and greedy thief? A loner, or working for a mastermind? Clever enough to manipulate the court process by pretending to have Asperger’s?
And the biggest question: where are all the birds the police didn’t recover?
To reveal the answers would be to spoil the pleasure of this tremendously entertaining book that’s partly true-crime detective story, with the author as detective, and partly an investigation of human greed.