This was kind of an odd read. I’m glad I picked it up and would recommend it in a heartbeat, but it’s not what I was expecting. It was billed to me as a non-violent art heist true crime type book (I can never resist an art heist!). And sure, that’s mostly technically true. However, the reality is a lot darker than that description implies. The whole book is basically a journey from the famous 18th century British naturalists cataloguing species of all kinds throughout the world, through the systematic destruction of those species by society, to conservation efforts that made the trafficking of certain species illegal in an attempt to protect endangered animals. This leads us up to the 21st century and our titular thief, Edwin Rist, a man obsessed with the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying.
Edwin grew up devoting himself to his two passions: fly-tying and music. As a student at the London’s Royal Academy of Music, he decided to rob the British Museum of Natural History. He stole thousands of dollars worth of bird specimens to use for himself and sell to other fly-tyers. It’s actually really difficult to put a price on the birds he stole because they are unreplaceable specimens from history. You can’t just walk back in time and get more.
The author, Kirk Wallace Johnson, is an avid fisher and heard about this story and started to investigate obsessively. Although Rist was caught eventually, there were a lot of unknowns about the case. Where did all those birds go? Did he have an accomplice? Is Rist a calculating criminal or a good person who made a mistake? I was riveted and horrified by this book. Johnson dives deep into the fly-tying community and for the most part, finds a bunch of people who condemn Rist publicly, but privately profit off his crime and close ranks when outside forces try to investigate. I finished this book with a burning anger towards sooooo many people and institutions.