March 1990: $500 million worth of paintings, including one Vermeer, three Rembrandts, and five Degas, were stolen from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The thieves posed as police officers to enter then tied up the security guards. They have never been apprehended.
February 1994: Edvard Munch’s The Scream, worth $119 million, was stolen from the National Gallery in Oslo while the nation was distracted by the launch of the 1994 Winter Olympics. The thieves broke in through a window, leaving behind a note that read, “Thanks for the poor security.”
June 2009: A burglary at an outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. The loot? Millions of dollars worth of rare bird specimens. The thief? A twenty-year-old American flutist, Edwin Rist, armed with a rock and a suitcase. Rist got away with 24 Magnificent Riflebirds, 37 King Birds of Paradise, and 47 Indian Crows, among others, allegedly selling them for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but never serving time due to a controversial Asperger’s defense.
Museum heist books are one of my favorite categories of true crime books. The Gardner Heist: The True Story of the World’s Largest Unsolved Art Theft by Ulrich Boser and The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece by Edward Dolnick, about the above-mentioned robberies are two of my favorites.
The genre’s notable newest addition is The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Los Angeles author Kirk Wallace Anderson.
“A museum heist that’s for the birds” – that’s Hollywood’s logline if it ever attempts to make this book into a comedy. But luckily for readers and the future filmmaker who recognizes the cinematic potential of this extraordinary story, The Feather Thief cannot be contained or dumbed down. It’s about evolution, history, nihilism, Asperger syndrome, moral ambiguity, conservation, friendship, museum missions, and the obsessive underworld of the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Page after page of this book reveals a revelation, about the crime itself or about the hidden worlds Johnson exposes: the 21st International Fly-Tying Symposium in Somerset, New Jersey; the bird vault in the Ornithology Building of the Tring Natural History Museum in Tring, England; the boat belonging to British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace during his mid-1800s expedition of the Malay Archipelago. Wallace collected and classified hundreds of bird specimens including Magnificent Riflebirds, King Birds of Paradise, and Indian Crows — the exact same specimens that Rist stole 150 years later.
As well as a musician, Rist was also a champion fly tier. Fly-tying is the making of flies using a variety of items such as fur and hair from animals, synthetic objects, beads, wire, and feathers from birds. Champion fly tiers pay hundreds even thousands of dollars to collect the beautiful plumage of exotic birds to use in their craft. Some may use the flies for fishing, their hobby serving a utilitarian purpose, and many sell the flies for profit. For some though, fly-tying is an art and an obsession, the search for perfect materials, especially feathers, fueled by bragging rights and a collector’s satisfaction in owning something rare and beautiful.
When discussing Johnson, comparisons with other authors are apparent: Mary Roach’s investigations into the worlds of astronauts and cadavers (“Stiff” and “Packing for Mars”); Susan Orlean’s blend of true crime, natural history, and obsession (“The Orchid Thief”); Mark Kurlansky’s focus on small things to illuminate big ones (“Salt: A World History” and “Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World”).
Even amongst his peers though, Johnson stands out: his experience with the U.S. Agency for International Development in Iraq; his subsequent mission to help Iraqis find refuge in America through The List Project; his years-long obsession with the Tring heist, inspired by an offhanded remark by a fellow fly fisherman; and his personal quest for truth and justice, both of which are called into question along his journey.
What’s not in question is Johnson’s prowess as a writer, beautifully demonstrated in this provocative and intelligent new book about one of the most bizarre museum heists of our time.
