Off the hook and free as a bird
Beauty, Obsession And The Natural History Heist Of The Century by Kirk Wallace Johnson Hutchinson, £20 KIRK WALLACE JOHNSON is an American veteran of the Iraq war whose career has taken an unexpected turn with The Feather Thief, his account of the “natural history crime of the century”.
A fellow American named Edwin Rist was a talented musician training to become a professional flautist at London’s Royal Academy Of Music when, in 2009, he took time off to journey to Tring, Hertfordshire.
There, under the cover of darkness, he broke into an outpost of the Natural History Museum and stole 299 priceless and irreplaceable antique bird skins, many of them collected by 19th-century naturalists at the height of the British Empire.
The Feather Thief largely follows the familiar beats of an entertaining true-crime procedural. Rist was motivated by his obsession with tying fishing flies according to mostly Victorian patterns and using original, rare feathers.
Johnson explains how the esoteric hobby of fly-tying has become one of the internet’s stranger and more obsessive corners. This is a pursuit for the sake of the art form rather than for anything as mundane as actually catching fish.
Here, as Johnson explains, you will find the “feather underground” and “a world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers, cokeheads and big game hunters, ex-detectives and shady dentists”. Obsession drives them to acquire rare materials in defiance of the law.
After returning from a summer holiday in his native USA, Rist started openly selling a number of the bird skins and feathers online. The feathers he stole were so rare that they were valued at £400,000. But their value to science was priceless.
After a fellow fly-tier tipped off the police, Rist was apprehended and ordered to pay more than £125,000 under the Proceeds Of Crime Act.
Rist escaped further penalties by claiming to have Asperger syndrome. When Johnson eventually meets Rist, he expresses “serious doubts” about the veracity of Edwin’s diagnosis. He also spoke “to a
The sorrowful legacy of heartbreak and loss
birthday but she lives alone, doesn’t sleep and clearly has an aching void in her life.
Gradually, in a series of flashbacks, we learn about the tragedy that befell her as a young woman of 20 and from which she has never recovered. These flashbacks are intercut with the story of what seems to be a burgeoning relationship with an older man. He too is sleepless and they first encounter one another when looking out of their flat windows in the middle of the night.
They go on a series of dates but it becomes increasingly clear that Mona is still hampered by her past. She grew up in the west of Ireland, losing her mother to cancer as a small child. Although close to her father, she felt suffocated by her parochial seaside town, and in the early 1970s moved to Birmingham. She works in a factory, lives in digs and goes dancing on a Saturday night.
She meets William, a charming Irish apprentice who is determined to be a better man than his drunken father. Seeing number of people who knew Edwin who thought the Asperger diagnosis was bulls**t”.
Johnson’s book takes in a brief history of the feather trade with fascinating short chapters on Alfred Russel Wallace, the naturalist who was the first to bring birds of paradise to Britain in the mid-19th century.
There is an account of how Walter Rothschild, a black sheep of the wealthy banking dynasty, amassed “the greatest private collection of bird skins and natural history specimens ever acquired by a single person” and which formed the basis of the Natural History Museum’s collection that Edwin Rist would plunder a century later.
Johnson contrasts the efforts of generations of naturalists and museum curators to preserve rare bird specimens in the interests of science with the likes of Rist, “the feather underground… the centuries of men and women who looted the skies and forests for wealth and status, driven by greed and the desire to possess what others didn’t”.
We learn how conspicuous consumption and the rise of fashion led many exotic birds to the point of extinction in the late 18th and 19th centuries.
Johnson is furious about the fact that Rist, who is now a professional flautist in New York, essentially got away with his crime. He merely repaid cash for stealing priceless and irreplaceable scientific specimens, a third of which were sold and are now untraceable. “In the war between knowledge and greed,” Johnson concludes, “it sure seemed as though greed was winning.” Mona shivering, he encircles her with his jacket, beginning a passionate relationship which quickly leads to marriage and Mona’s pregnancy.
Mona’s labour coincides with the Birmingham pub bombings of 1974 and it is not a good night to have an Irish accent in the city. Events spiral out of control, forcing Mona and William apart and leaving Mona no option but to return to Ireland.
Kit de Waal, author of My Name Is Leon, has a masterly ability to create atmosphere. She evokes the straitened world of the three-day week and grim digs where you need coins to feed the gas meter. She reminds us how unsympathetic maternity and mental health care were as recently as 1974.
The awkwardness of the relationship between Mona and her would-be lover is brought vividly to life and there is a twist at the end I hadn’t seen coming.
The Trick To Time is an emotionally engaging novel but relentlessly sad. To order any of the books featured, post free (UK only), please phone The Express Bookshop on You may also send a cheque made payable to or you can order online at www.expressbookshop.com