Are you the killer, Mr Poe?

The Blackest Bird

By Joel Rose

Canongate [pound]12.99

The unsolved murder of Mary Rogers, a beautiful shop assistant, in 1841, is one of New York's most enduring crime stories. Like the atrocities of Jack the Ripper, the case involved a brutally butchered girl, illicit sex and a dark, urban setting of top hats and silhouettes. The excellent first chapter of this long, atmospheric novel finds the villain disposing of Mary's body in the Hudson River.

High constable Jacob Hays hopes to find the killer among the feral gangs that ter-rorise the populace. Not that he can do much to act on this or any other hunch. His tiny constabulary is either on the take or amateurish to the point of opposing the proposal of uniforms because they don't want to "look like butlers". Hays relies on his daughter, Olga, to be a sounding board for his theories and for investigative assistance. His interrogation techniques - "Confess!" and "Good citizens will tell the truth" are favourite admonitions when interviewing a suspect - could certainly do with some help. Yet somehow he manages to pin down two further homicides that might or might not have a bearing on the Mary Rogers case. Hovering all the while in the background is the gothic figure of Edgar Allan Poe, who claims he will unmask Mary's killer in a forthcoming novel.

What started as a murder mystery gradually turns into a portrait of Poe, emphasising his implacable jealousy of other writers, weaknesses for beautiful women, alcohol and opium, and appreciation of his own genius. But much of this biographical element is sketchy, tentative and second-hand, with references to plagiarism, incest and insanity left largely in the realm of rumour. To his literary followers he's regarded as "the Shakespeare of America", a writer who "has created nothing less than a new Nowhere in the empire of literature". To his publisher, he's "the loneliest individual in the world". As Hays begins to suspect that Poe murdered Mary, Olga stumbles under the "troubled" writer's charismatic spell.

By this stage the pacing has gone awry, the suspense broken by long passages on arcane contemporary issues such as international copyright law. As a whole the story is told from a curious distance, with omniscient narration, newspaper reports and vox populi - "Now people were saying that she was even prettier than her sister" - taking the place of action and dialogue. Even the main characters remain frustratingly out of reach. Hays is known as "the consummate shadow"; Poe is "a shade to [Hays's] shadow". Apt metaphors indeed.

The novel works best as a vivid historical landscape of a city whose fire brigades are manned by street toughs, where rough justice is served by the "hemp necklace" and politicians pander shamelessly to the masses. Joel Rose is particularly scathing about the exploitation of Mary's fate by sanctimonious, hypocritical newspaper editors and ambitious, unworthy novelists. Just when Rose is about to be hoist by this petard, he "solves" the case in an unexpected denoue-ment that ties up loose ends and finally fulfils the promise of the opening chapters.

Further browsing Read about the crime on www.crimeli-brary.com/ notorious_murders/classics/mary_rogers /3.html

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