TURNS out that Winston Churchill was wrong: history is not written by the victors, instead it seems that thriller writers have taken up the task. In recent years, there has been a glut of novels that feature reallife characters and historical events and yet remain defiantly on the fiction shelf . . . and Joel Rose's mystery The Blackest Bird is yet another addition to the canon.

Set in New York City in the early 1840s, the story concerns the murder of Mary Rogers and the subsequent investigation by High Constable Jacob Hays.

Rogers worked in a cigar shop that was a regular haunt of the literary and journalistic community and so the story became major national news and one of the first examples of the public becoming hooked on the lurid details of a brutal crime.

Famed horror writer Edgar Allan Poe starts writing a thinlyveiled 'fictional' account of the investigation in a monthly periodical and his detailed tale starts to suggest he may know more about the incident than any outsider should or could.

To further complicate Hays' life, he must divide his time with another murder investigation as poet John Colt, part of the firearms dynasty, confesses to killing his publisher, all of which may or may not have anything to do with the initial murder.

The Blackest Bird is subtitled "A Novel of History and Murder" and all of the aforementioned is indeed fact. But from there Rose plays fast and loose with history and literature. The effect can be frustrating.

Those with a prior knowledge of Poe will find themselves skimming some biographical pages, while those without will glean information likely to see them come a cropper at a table quiz some night.

Novels such as this are typically described as "meticulously researched" and there is no doubt The Blackest Bird is. But Rose seems to end up enslaved by his knowledge.

Great amounts of Poe's dialogue are taken verbatim from his stories and poetry, and Rose admits to stitching in bits pilfered from Whitman, Melville, Twain and others.

Given such self-imposed restrictions it seems odd that Rose chooses to indulge his artistic licence with actual works by Poe, changing names in some of his poems and presenting a bastardized version of The Raven.

Equally, the wealth of knowledge at Rose's fingertips occasionally skews the plot's weighting, as a confession can be wrested from a seemingly obdurate central character within a paragraph, but far longer is needed to explain the workings of a street vendor of the era.

Superfluous appearances by literary luminaries such as Charles Dickens also serve to hamstring the plot's momentum and strain our suspension of disbelief.

But while wrestling with history leads to Rose doing a lot of huffing and puffing, he still manages to convert this into a page-turning read and impressively delineates a convoluted plot.

Any worries about having an ending that history has already decided are dodged by proving at least one Churchill quote to still have substance: "History will be kind to me for I intend to write it."