The Blackest Bird (50 page)

A magazine title,
Sartain’s
, featuring the poetry of the late Edgar Allan Poe, lies open at his elbow.

The dead poet’s final words published, his last sad song.

He begins to recline in the patent chair as he hears the threshold door open from outside into the kitchen and softly close.

Old Hays, Jacob Hays, high constable of the great metropolis, the city of New York, reaches for the matched Colt revolvers sepulchred on the sideboard, his steadfast image etched on the oiled blue steel of each cylinder, knowing full well his daughter, his Olga, his Mary Olga, could not be returned home so soon.

Many years ago—it seems like forever—I started this book the very next day after finishing my first novel,
Kill the Poor
, probably because I had the work ethic of Anthony Trollope on the mind.

Here we are some seventeen years later (eighteen if you include holidays) and I’m finally finished.

I want to thank, need to thank, Karen Rinaldi for countless conversations, manifestations, maturations, and invitations, Lara Webb Carrigan for editorial assistance and focus, and my agent, Kim Witherspoon, for tireless reading and savvy suggestion. My gratitude to Tony Bourdain, David Friedman, Catherine Texier, early readers all, and Jeffrey Danneman, for his eager help with start-up research.

To my editor and publisher at Canongate, Jamie Byng, to Jill Bialosky at Norton, I also say thank you. As well to Jessica Craig at Canongate for her enthusiasm and encouragement, and Rose Marie Morse at Morse Partners. Also to David Miller, Yelena Gitlin, Adele McCarthy-Beauvais, and Evan Carver, my gratitude.

Poe himself was often accused of palming off, and I, too, took this
as my easy master. Great amounts of Poe’s dialogue in
The Blackest
Bird
are taken, sometimes word for word, from his stories, essays, and poetry.

Also stitched in are bits pilfered from Whitman, Dickens, Melville, Longfellow, Irving, and Twain, among others. I thought of these appropriations as homage and a puzzle.

Certain poems attributed to one writer are actually the work of another. Fanny Osgood’s poem to Poe, not hers but the work of “the Seeress of Providence,” Sarah Helen Whitman. The poems attributed to John Colt are not, as far as I know, his. The Samuel Adams murder poem can be found in Warden Charles Sutton’s
The New York Tombs:
Its Secrets and Its Mysteries
. Other bits of doggerel given over by me to Colt are culled from Edward Van Every’s
Sins of New York
.

The version of “The Raven” included here is actually a blending of two early drafts. I have taken liberties with other of Poe’s work, substituting, for example, the name “Virginia” for “Lenore.”

History is story, and
The Blackest Bird
is a work of fiction. On occasion I have made certain changes in place and time and character, sometimes painfully, to accommodate the narrative.

There is neither record nor evidence that James Gordon Bennett and Rufus Griswold ever worked in concert against Poe.

The dedication of
The Blackest Bird
, attributed by me to Poe, is not actually his, but used as one of three introductory quotations to his collected poetry edition,
Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems
(Baltimore: Hatch and Dunning, 1829), plucked by the poet from “A Song of Sack” in
The Works of John Cleveland
(1687); its attribution, according to Poe scholar and compiler Thomas Ollive Mabbott, is doubted.

It was not Olga Hays who administered to the stricken Sissy Poe and the Poe family at the last, but Miss Marie Louise Shew.

Edward Coleman led the Forty Thieves, but Tommy Coleman is from my imagination.

Samuel Colt died in 1862 from syphilis, what was then called,
according to George Washington Matsell, “the Venus curse.” There is no proof that Colonel Colt was ever involved in the murder of Mary Rogers, or even that he ever knew her.

I am indebted to the staffs of the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, and the Museum of the City of New York.

Special thanks to Marvin Taylor at the Fales Library of New York University.

My research began all those many years ago at the wonderful New York antiquarian bookstore New York Bound, with the purchase of a now completely dissolute 1928 edition of Herbert Asbury’s
Gangs of
New York
, and continued through any number of purchases and acquisitions. The books I went back to time and again in constructing this novel and resurrecting Poe and his contemporaries include:

Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe
by Hervey Allen

Edgar A. Poe
by Kenneth Silverman

Plumes in the Dust: The Love Affair of Edgar Allan Poe and Fanny
Osgood, Poe the Detective: The Curious Circumstances Behind “The Mystery
of Marie Rogêt
,” and
Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of
Edgar Allan Poe
, all by John Evangelist Walsh

The Brief Career of Eliza Poe
by Geddeth Smith

The Importance of Trifles
by Avram Davidson

Sins of New York: As Exposed by the Police Gazette
by Edward Van Every

The New York Tombs: Its Secrets and Its Mysteries
by Charles Sutton

The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-
Century New York
by Amy Gilman Srebnick

A History of the Colt Revolver
by Charles T. Haven and Frank A. Belden

Froth & Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America’s
First Mass Medium
by Andie Tucher

The Encyclopedia of New York City
by Kenneth T. Jackson

Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898
by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace

Valentine’s Manual of the City of New York
, edited by David Thomas Valentine

The Secret Language of Crime: The Rogue’s Lexicon
, compiled by New York City chief of police George W. Matsell

I have made use of any number of Poe anthologies, by far the most thorough being Thomas Ollive Mabbott’s three-volume
Complete
Works
collocation, published by the University of Illinois Press.

Lastly, the libel lawsuit and judgment found in favor of Poe against James Gordon Bennett in the novel was, in reality, awarded against Hiram Fuller and Augustus W. Clason Jr. and the
New York Evening
Mirror
, and filed under different circumstances than those described.

Joel Rose is the author of two previous novels,
Kill the Poor
and
Kill Kill Faster Faster
. He established and co-edited the legendary literary magazine
Between C&D
. He lives in New York City and on the Jersey shore.

New York Sawed in Half
Kill Kill Faster Faster
Kill the Poor