Grip the Raven
Grip was Charles Dickens’ beloved pet raven: Grip the Clever, Grip the Knowing, Grip the Wicked. This mischievous bird with an impressive vocabulary was the great writer’s boon companion. Sadly, one night in 1841, Grip died after a brief and violent illness, probably caused the bird’s propensity to eat paint. (At that time, paints were especially toxic, with some containing high levels of arsenic–a fact that comes into play in my supernatural mystery The Murderer’s Apprentice.) Dickens’ account of the raven’s final hours is heartrending. In a letter to a friend, he related how Grip spent his last moments repeating his favorite phrase: Hello, old girl. When Grip croaked his last, Dickens was grief-stricken. Remembering is an integral part of grieving. Upon Grip’s death, Dickens was so distraught he had the raven stuffed and mounted. But he also bequeathed another kind of immortality upon his friend–a literary one—when Dickens wrote the talking raven Grip into his novel Barnaby Rudge. A