Mean streets

THE seamy sidewalks of Manhattan have been Joel Rose’s literary turf for a quarter-century. He founded the magazine Between C & D in 1983 to showcase writers operating on the edges -- physical and metaphysical -- of New York City.

His first novel, “Kill the Poor” (1988), captured tensions between gentrifying newcomers and resentful longtime Lower East Side residents with the biting specificity of personal experience; like Rose, the book’s protagonist had moved into an apartment on the grungy downtown block where his grandmother lived after emigrating from Hungary. The 1997 novel “Kill, Kill, Faster, Faster” drew on the author’s experiences working for TV shows like “Kojak” and “Miami Vice” as it followed a convicted murderer hired as a scriptwriter through his misadventures on (where else?) New York’s meanest streets.

Even when Rose turned to history in “New York Sawed in Half” (2001), his focus remained on unsavory characters and social disarray: Retelling the urban legend of an 1824 hoax, he depicted two con men taking advantage of widespread unemployment and poverty to convince people that the overdeveloped island of Manhattan was about to sink into the harbor unless they chopped it in two and pulled one section over to the mainland.

So it’s no surprise that Rose’s new novel, “The Blackest Bird,” begins with a gruesome murder, includes several more violent deaths and has as its cast of characters vicious gang members, slimy politicians, grave robbers, decadent authors and exploitative publishers -- all pursuing their wicked ways in the darkest corners of 1840s New York, with occasional New Jersey side trips to view a hideously disfigured corpse and confront a shady witness.

The author didn’t have to invent much. The death of “Beautiful Segar Girl” Mary Rogers in July 1841 is an actual event, as is the killing six weeks later of printer Samuel Adams by aggrieved poet John Colt. Most of Rose’s protagonists, including New York City High Constable Jacob Hays, firearms manufacturer Samuel Colt (John’s brother) and tormented writer Edgar Allan Poe (who based “The Mystery of Marie Roget” on the Rogers case), were real people. And anyone who has perused the more unvarnished volumes of the city’s history (many of them listed in Rose’s acknowledgments) can attest to his descriptions of the foul Five Points slum, the hypocritically moralizing tone New York Herald Editor James Gordon Bennett used to sell papers, the corruption endemic in a chaotic city whose volunteer fire brigades were largely staffed by street toughs and whose lawmen were so poorly paid that most had to hold second jobs.

Hays and his daughter Olga are the only ones who display any ethical substance in this tale. Haunted by the fear that his intelligent, adored daughter could also fall prey to random street violence -- it’s thought at first that a gang raped and killed Rogers -- Hays spends eight years trying to discover who murdered her. There’s no mystery for him, however, in the 1842 fire that severely damages the Tombs prison: It was set, Hays is certain, to enable John Colt to escape execution. Sure enough, we learn that the Colt family later colludes with the parents of gang leader Tommy Coleman (also slated for “the hemp necklace”) to evade the not terribly long arm of New York City law. In this polluted universe, the wealthy and the criminal classes are equally contemptuous of conventional morality, equally certain that the rules don’t apply to them.

That’s business as usual in Old Manhattan, the author suggests, using Hays as his mouthpiece. “On the first day Europeans set foot on this island, seven men lost their lives,” he tells his daughter. “Since that day the killing has not stopped, Death and violence is the mere tapestry of life in this city.” Tammany Hall “has made a deft success of harnessing the ignorant and the indigent” to stymie any attempts to clean up New York, Hays informs Mayor-elect James Harper. It’s hard to feel very bad about this, since the allegedly reform-minded Harper is an anti-Irish bigot just as happy as Tammany to cater to the prejudices of the mob, so long as it’s Protestant. The powerful book publisher reveals further nasty traits when he accuses Poe, who had the poor judgment to write something for a competing firm, of being responsible for Rogers’ death.

Poe’s involvement in the murder investigation highlights the central problem of this atmospheric, overstuffed novel: Rose’s failure to get his historical material under fictional control. It’s perfectly acceptable to take the fact that Poe wrote a story based on Rogers’ death and imagine that the gloomy writer might have had an affair with the pretty young tobacco shop employee. It’s fine to entangle her case with the Colt murder and to have Hays identify another real-life figure as Mary’s killer, even though an author’s note cheerfully admits there’s no proof that this man knew her. But it’s boring to have Hays and Olga (an ardent Poe fan) comb through “The Mystery of Marie Roget” for clues to the author’s culpability and irritating to read lengthy rehashes of Poe’s life -- his drinking and drug-taking, his mortally ill child bride, his literary feuds, etc. And it’s infuriating to trot out Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Herman Melville, Mathew Brady and other irrelevant big names solely to decorate a self-indulgent salon scene at which Poe reads “The Raven” (reprinted in full).

Throughout the book, Rose drops in background information on everything from “hot corn girls” and the workings of a revolver to the intricacies of 19th century copyright disputes, digressions that don’t necessarily enrich his narrative but merely encumber it. Perhaps he’s trying to emulate the Victorian novel’s contemplative tone and leisurely pace, but these qualities are not well suited to his sensational tale, nor, it must be noted, to Rose’s gifts as a writer. The sharp humor and his sardonic pleasure in the seedy subject matter that enlivened “Kill the Poor” are regrettably absent here. The occasional flash of fabulous gutter slang like “high gaggers” and “nocky-boy” underscores the generally slack nature of the prose. Characterization has never been Rose’s strongest suit, so Hays and Olga’s increasing fondness for Poe has little emotional force, and we gain no new insights into the writer’s tortured soul that would justify the excessive amount of time we spend with him.

Still, there’s a certain sinister power in the novel’s closing chapters, which posit Poe’s mysterious death -- he was found delirious, wearing someone else’s clothes -- as a consequence of his incautious attempt to blackmail Rogers’ killer. On the final page, Rose employs Poe’s poetry (in a judicious excerpt, this time) to evoke the forces of darkness closing in on a beleaguered defender of order. In Rose’s New York, the bad guys frequently come out on top, if not precisely unscathed, and “The Blackest Bird” is no exception. *