My favorite true-crime stories are the ones I consider “niche” crimes.
Tree crime. Book crime. Mushroom crime. Dinosaurs! Fish! Birds!
By my standards, in order be considered a “niche” crime, a true-crime account must meet the following criteria:
- It must, first and foremost, be niche. It must be a small, specialized crime. It cannot be ordinary. Most of us will never be in a position where we can steal moon rocks.
- Very few — if any — people should be hurt; although murder is not an immediate disqualifier. However, I’m not interested in sensationalized and exploitative details of tragedies. If we are drawn to tales of crime for the same reason we crane our necks as we drive past an accident, then niche crime must resemble the collision between a clown car and a hijacked Oscar Meyer weinermobile.
The Feather Thief is, in my opinion, the crème de la crème of niche crime. I first read it about 8 years ago and I have never been able to stop thinking about it.
The crime? A theft. The location? The British Museum of Natural History. The culprit? A twenty-year old American flute-prodigy named Edwin. And what he stole — hundreds of irreplaceable, priceless bird skins — is as interesting as his motivation for stealing them, and as interesting as the confluence of man’s limitless capacity for obsession and nature’s finiteness.
Kirk Wallace Johnson is our intrepid journalist/historian/detective. He begins his saga in a river, fly-fishing. This origin is important. Edwin’s motivation for the heist? His obsession with fly-tying.
Wallace Johnson not only explores the details of the crime and its perpetrator; he also delves into the history of the feather-obsessed (“feather fever,” as he calls it). Somewhat reminiscent of the “tulip mania” of 17th century Netherlands, the 19th and early 20th century decimated exotic bird populations in pursuit of status. The more feathers/literal bird corpses affixed to your garments, the more wealth it signified — after all, rare birds had to be sought out from distant, difficult-to-reach islands and rain-forests. While women wore hats bearing plumes of feathers or one — or more! — stuffed birds, men competed to tie more and more elaborate flies with increasingly exotic materials. Public outcry eventually led to the disfavoring of real feathers in fashion, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act helped to cut off the fly-tiers’ supply.
So, if you are absolutely obsessed with fly-tying — particularly recreating the ties of the Victorian era — but those birds are either extinct or illegal to have in whole or in part…what do you do?
You could use synthetic materials to mimic the classic ties. After all, the fish don’t care. But this isn’t about the fish, of course — Edwin never waded into a river — it’s about status.
So, you go where the feathers are already neatly collected and preserved…
And since the British Natural History Museum isn’t just going to hand over specimens so that you can destroy them…
Well, that’s when you become The Feather Thief.
Johnson, Kirk Wallace. The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century. Penguin Books, 2019.
