by Joel Rose
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.
About the Author
The Blackest Bird
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.
Also by Joel Rose
New York Sawed in Half
Kill Kill Faster Faster
Kill the Poor
Copyright
First published in the USA in 2007 by
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York
First published in Great Britain in 2007 by
Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,
Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition first published in 2009 by
Canongate Books
Copyright © Joel Rose, 2007
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 638 2
www.meetatthegate.com
